Thursday, April 23, 2026

W.H. Auden wrote a sonnet about Richard Jefferies

I was reading Nicholas Jenkins's The Island: W. H. Auden and the Last of Englishness – or scanning for a column I'm writing, if I'm honest – when I came across a reference to a sonnet by Auden on Richard Jefferies.

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.


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