Men heard this roar of parleying starlings, saw, A thousand years ago even as now,  Black rooks with white gulls following the plough  So that the first are last until the caw Commands that last are first again, - a law  Which was of old when one, like me, dreamed how A thousand years might dust lie on his brow  Yet thus would birds do between hedge and shaw.  Time swims before me, making as a day  A thousand years, while the broad ploughland oak  Roars mill-like and men strike and bear the...

Today I want the sky, The tops of the high hills, Above the last man’s house, His hedges, and his cows, Where, if I will, I look  Down even on sheep and rook, And of all things that move  See buzzards only above: - Past all trees, past furze  And thorn, where naught deters  The desire of the eye  For sky, nothing but sky. I sicken of the woods  And all the multitudes  Of hedge trees. They are no more  Than weeds upon this floor  Of the river of air  Leagues deep, leagues wide, where  I am...

There's nothing like the sun as the year dies, Kind as it can be, this world being made so, To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies, To all things that it touches except snow, Whether on mountain side or street of town.  The south wall warms me: November has begun, Yet never shone the sun as fair as now While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough  With spangles of the morning’s storm drop down  Because the starling shakes it, whistling what  Once swallows sang. But I have not...