dots-menu
×

Home  »  The English Poets  »  Braddan Vicarage

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke

Thomas Edward Brown (1830–1897)

Braddan Vicarage

I WONDER if in that fair isle,

Some child is growing now, like me

When I was child: care-pricked, yet healed the while

With balm of rock and sea.

I wonder if the purple ring

That rises on a belt of blue

Provokes the little bashful thing

To guess what may ensue,

When he has pierced the screen, and holds the further clue.

I wonder if beyond the verge

He dim conjectures England’s coast:

The land of Edwards and of Henries, scourge

Of insolent foemen, at the most

Faint caught where Cumbria looms a geographic ghost.

I wonder if to him the sycamore

Is full of green and tender light;

If the gnarled ash stands stunted at the door,

By salt sea-blast defrauded of its right;

If budding larches feed the hunger of his sight.

I wonder if to him the dewy globes

Like mercury nestle in the caper leaf;

If, when the white narcissus dons its robes,

It soothes his childish grief;

If silver plates the birch, gold rustles in the sheaf.

I wonder if to him the heath-clad mountain

With crimson pigment fills the sensuous cells;

If like full bubbles from an emerald fountain

Gorse-bloom luxuriant wells;

If God with trenchant forms the insolent lushness quells.

*****

I wonder if he loves that Captain bold

Who has the horny hand,

Who swears the mighty oath, who well can hold,

Half-drunk, serene command,

And guide his straining bark to refuge of the land.

I wonder if he thinks the world has aught

Of strong, or nobly wise,

Like him by whom the invisible land is caught

With instinct true, nor storms, nor midnight skies

Avert the settled aim, or daunt the keen emprise.

I wonder if he deems the English men

A higher type beyond his reach,

Imperial blood, by Heaven ordained with pen

And sword the populous world to teach;

If awed he hears the tones as of an alien speech;

*****

Ah! crude, undisciplined, when thou shalt know

What good is in this England, still of joys

The chiefest count it thou wast nurtured so

That thou may’st keep the larger equipoise,

And stand outside these nations and their noise.