It turns out to have been written when the poet was 18 years old and to be included in the collection W. H. Auden. Juvenilia: Poems 1922–28. It also seems that the young Auden's chief acquaintance with Jefferies' work came via the biography of him by Edward Thomas.
I can't find the whole sonnet online, but here is an extract:
What more? When dying he could praise the light
And watch larks trembling over fields of corn
Until the whole sky sang, with eyes as bright
As kestrel perched upon the splintered oak,
A sentinel, dark, motionless, at dawn.
What of this Man? No striding Amos sent
ReplyDeleteDown from his native crags to thunder war,
No Shelley to light up the firmament
And plunge to darkness like a shattered star;
Rather winds found a pipe and blew thereon,
Sometimes with bubbling joy, now wild with griefs
But fresh as elder scent; his voice cries on
Among his Wiltshire downs; in strange beliefs
And rough slow-moving speech of village folk;
What more? When dying he could praise the light
And watch larks trembling over fields of corn
Until the whole sky sang, with eyes as bright
As kestrel perched upon the splintered oak,
A sentinel, dark, motionless, at dawn.
Thank you!
DeleteThere's also that stanza of the Letter to Lord Byron:
ReplyDeleteI can't read Jefferies on the Wiltshire Downs,
Nor browse on limericks in a smoking room;
Who would try Trollope in cathedral towns,
Or Marie Stopes inside his mother's womb?
Perhaps you feel the same beyond the tomb.
Do the celestial highbrows only care
For works on Clydeside, Fascists, or Mayfair?
Thanks too!
Delete