A Charm of Birds

Long-tailed Tit, Aegithalos caudatus

I couldn't find a photo in the Captain's gallery that exactly fitted the line "a charm of birds" from the poem below. But I did find a picture of a bird of great charm.

We visited some secondhand bookshops on our Cornish trip and I found an anthology called "More Poetry Please!" - popular poems from the BBC Radio 4 programme.

These are poems us members of the public like, not necessarily the ones academics like. And I found some old favourites and this poem, which was worth buying the book for.


GOING FOR THE MILK
by Mary Webb

Going for the milk-
A toddling child with skin like curds,
On a May morning in a charm of birds.

Going for the milk
With laughing, teasing lads, at seventeen,
With rosy cheeks and breast as soft as silk -
Eh! What a mort of years between!

Going for the milk
Through my Jim's garden, past the bush o' balm,
With my first baby sleeping on my arm.

Its fifty year, come Easter, since that day;
The work'us ward is cold, my eyes be dim;
Never no more I'll go the flowery way,
Fetching the milk.  I drink the pauper's skim,
And mind me of those summer days, and Jim
Telling me as my breast was soft as silk -
And that first day I missed to fetch the milk.


Mary Webb's masterpiece is surely her novel "Gone to Earth".    In it she asks the questions too, though she does not know the answers.     This poem is a little masterpiece as well.

She saw and loved the beauty of the creation - loved it with all her heart - wrote about it, praised it.  This poem, with its charm of birds, praises it.   But it asks the questions too.   Why is life so short? And why is the world so full of cruelty and injustice?

I hope that when the time comes, Jehovah will wake her from the dreamless sleep of death and she will see this lovely earth again.  And this time, all cruelty, all injustice will have gone.  Under the loving rule of the Kingdom of God, the peace of Eden will prevail earthwide,

Its raining this morning and I have not gone out on the preaching work. I hope to get out the next 3 days though...