Wild Flowers 



my foot first touched the grass. It has another 

 meaning now; the sunshine and the flowers speak 

 differently, for a heart that has once known sorrow 

 reads behind the page, and sees sadness in joy. But 

 the freshness is still there, the dew washes the colours 

 before dawn. Unconscious happiness in finding wild 

 flowers unconscious and unquestioning, and there- 

 fore unbounded. 



I used to stand by the mower and follow the scythe 

 sweeping down thousands of the broad-flowered 

 daisies, the knotted knapweeds, the blue scabious, 

 the yellow rattles, sweeping so close and true that 

 nothing escaped; and, yet although I had seen so 

 many hundreds of each, although I had lifted armfuls 

 day after day, still they were fresh. They never 

 lost their newness, and even now each time I gather 

 a wild flower it feels a new thing. The greenfinches 

 came to the fallen swathe so near to us they seemed 

 to have no fear; but I remember the yellowhammers 

 most, whose colour, like that of the wild flowers and 

 the sky, has never faded from my memory. The 

 greenfinches sank into the fallen swathe, the loose 

 grass gave under their weight and let them bathe in 

 flowers. 



One yellowhammer sat on a branch of ash the live- 

 long morning, still singing in the sun; his bright 

 head, his clean bright yellow, gaudy as Spain, was 

 drawn like a brush charged heavily with colour across 

 the retina, painting it deeply, for there on the eye's 

 memory it endures, though that was boyhood and 

 this is manhood, still unchanged. The field 

 Stewart's Mash the very tree, young ash timber, 

 the branch projecting over the sward, I could make 

 a map of them. Sometimes I think sun-painted 

 colours are brighter to me than to many, and more 



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