The poem ‘Morning’ by John Clare, was going round my mind a bit as I walked the hill that day and saw nature in all its magnificence- it was in a book of poems I keep by my bedside, ‘Poetry Please!’, popular poems from BBC radio 4, a lovely book.

Morning

By John Clare

The morning comes, the drops of dew

Hang on the grass and bushes too;

The sheep more eager bite the grass

Whose moisture gleams like drops of glass;

The heifer licks in grass and dew

That makes her drink and fodder too.

The little bird his morn-song gives,

His breast wet with the dripping leaves,

Then stops abruptly just to fly

And catch the wakened butterfly,

That goes to sleep behind the flowers

Or backs of leaves from dews and showers.

The yellow-hammer, haply blest,

Sits by the dyke upon her nest;

The long grass hides her from the day,

The water keeps the boys away.

The morning sun is round and red

As crimson curtains round a bed,

The dewdrops hang on barley horns

As beads the necklace thread adorns,

The dewdrops hang wheat-ears upon

Like golden drops against the sun.

Hedge-sparrows in the bush cry ‘tweet’,

O’er nests larks winnow in the wheat,

Till the sun turns gold and gets more high,

And paths are clean and grass gets dry,

And longest shadows pass away.

And brightness is the blaze of day.