Author Archives: davidjsutton

Week 694: The Oakey Strike Evictions, by Tommy Armstrong

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Thomas (Tommy) Armstrong (1849-1919) was a true poet of the people whose verses, published originally in the form of broadsheets that he sold round public houses for a penny a time, chronicled the life and hard times of the Durham mining community towards the end of the nineteenth century. Known as the Pitman Poet, he achieved a reputation in particular for writing songs about mining disasters, of which ‘The Trimdon Grange Disaster’ is the best known.

‘The Oakey Strike Evictions’ describes the repressive measures taken by the coal owners of the time in the face of industrial unrest. When miners at the Oakey pit in the Northwest Durham Coalfield, long subject to dangerous working conditions, low pay and long hours, went on strike in 1885 the owner did not hesitate to call in a force of hired goons (the ‘candymen’ of the song), to evict the miners from their homes (which were, of course, owned by the colliery). They were led by the town crier (‘Johnny whe carries the bell’).

The words were set to a jaunty tune, which works well to counterpoint the anger and contempt of the lyrics. Note that the prime focus of this anger and contempt is not so much the bosses, who are cheerfully consigned to hell with no particular animus, because the boss class were ever thus and you wouldn’t expect anything different from them, but the underlings, the candymen and the town crier, who come from the same social class as the miners yet let themselves be used as tools of oppression. The same spirit informs another song of the period, the viciously anti-scab ‘Blackleg Miner’, probably best known as sung by Steeleye Span on their album ‘Hark The Village Wait’.

The Oakey Strike Evictions were long remembered in the north-east, with a long smouldering resentment that burst into flame again during the miners’ strike in the 1980s.

Note: ‘candyman’ does not here have its modern American sense of ‘drug pusher’. A candyman at the time could simply be one who sold sweets, and could also be a rag-and-bone man who would give sweets in exchange for recyclable materials that he collected on a cart. (Now there’s a trade that’s disappeared, but when I was a child in the nineteen-fifties we still had a rag-and-bone man come up the road periodically with his horse and cart, for housewives to bring out their unwanted textiles or scrap metal and perhaps get sixpence or a shilling in return). But the candyman of the poem is simply a hired thug, often drawn from dockside labourers in the large towns, the implication of the name being that they would do anything for a handful of sweets.

The Oakey Strike Evictions

It was in November and I never will forget
When the polisses and the candymen at Oakey Hooses met
Johnny the Bellman, he was there, he was squintin’ roond aboot
And they put three men on every door to turn the miners oot

And what would ah de if ah had the power mesel’?
Ah would hang the twenty candymen and Johnny whe carries the bell

They went from hoose to hoose and then they put things on the road
But mind they didn’t hurt themselves, carrying heavy loads
One would carry the poker oot, the fender or the rake
But if they carried two at once, it was a great mistake

Oh what would ah de if ah had the power mesel’?
Ah would hang the twenty candymen and Johnny whe carries the bell

Some of these dandy candymen were dressed up like a clown
Some had hats without a slice and some of them without a crown
And one of them that was with them, aye, I’ll swear that he was worse
Cos every time he had to speak, it was a terrible farce

And what would ah de if ah had the power mesel’?
Ah would hang the twenty candymen and Johnny whe carries the bell

Well next up comes the masters and I think they should be shamed
Depriving wives and families of their comfortable homes
And when you shift from where you live, I hope you go to hell
Along with the twenty candymen and Johnny who carries the bell

And what would ah de if ah had the power mesel’?
Ah would hang the twenty candymen and Johnny whe carries the bell

Thomas Armstrong

Week 693: From ‘The Nabara’, by C. Day Lewis

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‘The Nabara’ is a long narrative poem by Cecil Day Lewis (see also weeks 240 and 396) which is based on an incident during the Spanish Civil War known as the Battle of Cape Matxitxavo, when four lightly armed trawlers of the Basque Republican Navy engaged a heavy cruiser, the Canarias, belonging to Franco’s fascist Nationalist forces in a desperate attempt to protect a transport ship, the Galdames, carrying passengers and supplies for the Republicans. Numbers may have been on their side, but of course given the disparity in armaments it was like minnows attacking a pike, and three of the trawlers soon retired from the fray; the Nabara fought on and was eventually sunk, with the few surviving members of its crew being taken prisoner.

It is interesting to speculate how far Day Lewis was inspired in the making of the poem by Tennyson’s ‘The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet’, which treats of a similar battle against impossible odds. Certainly those ‘Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico’ could be seen as sharing a kinship across time with Tennyson’s ‘Men of Bideford in Devon’.

It’s a powerful and moving poem, though some may feel that it could have been even better Day Lewis had laboured the point a little less and left the facts of the narrative, to which he seems to have been pretty faithful, to speak for themselves more. That said, it remains an inspirational account of the lengths of self-sacrifice to which ordinary people at that that time, and perhaps even now, will go to defend their freedom.

The poem is rather long so I give only the concluding and in my view strongest section. We pick up the narrative where the Nabara is about to fight on alone.

From ‘The Nabara’

Phase Three

And now the gallant Nabara was left in the ring alone
The sky hollow around her, the fawning sea at her side:
But the ear-ringed crew in their berets stood to the guns, and cried
A fresh defiance down
The ebb of the afternoon, the battle’s darkening tide.
Honour was satisfied long since; they had held and harried
A ship ten times their size; they well could have called it a day.
But they hoped, if a little longer they kept the cruiser in play,
Galdames with the wealth of  life and metal she carried
Might make her getaway.

Canarias, though easily she outpaced and out-gunned her,
Finding this midge could sting
Edged off, and beneath a wedge of smoke steamed in a ring
On the rim of the trawler’s range, a circular storm of thunder.
But always Nabara turned her broadside, manoeuvring
To keep both guns on the target, scorning safety devices.
Slower now battle’s tempo, irregular the beat
Of gunfire in the heart
Of the afternoon, the distempered sky sank to the crisis,
Shell-shocked the sea tossed and hissed in delirious heat.

The battle’s tempo slowed, for the cruiser could take her time,
And the guns of the Nabara grew
Red-hot, and of fifty-two Basque seamen had been her crew
Many were dead already, the rest filthy with grime
And their comrades’ blood, weary with wounds all but a few.
Between two fires they fought, for the sparks that flashing spoke
From the cruiser’s thunder-bulk were answered  on their own craft
By traitor flames that crawled out of every cranny and rift
Blinding them all with smoke.
At half-past four Nabara was burning fore and aft.

What buoyancy of will
Was theirs to keep her afloat, no vessel now but a sieve –
So jarred and scarred, the rivets starting, no inch of her safe
From the guns of the foe that wrapped her in a cyclone of shrieking steel!
Southward the sheltering havens showed clear, the cliffs and the surf
Familiar to them from childhood, the shapes of a life still dear.
But dearer still to see
Those shores insured for life from the shadow of tyranny.
Freedom was not on their lips; it was what made them endure,
A steel spring in the yielding flesh, a thirst to be free.

And now from the little Donostia that lay with her 75’s
Dumb in the offing, they saw Nabara painfully lower
A boat, which crawled like a shattered crab slower and slower
Towards them. They cheered the survivors thankful to save these lives
At least. They saw each rower,
As the boat dragged alongside, was wounded – the oars they held
Dripping with blood, a bloody skein reeled out in their wake:
And they swarmed down the rope-ladders to rescue these men so weak
From wounds they must be hauled
Aboard like babies. And then they saw they had made a mistake.

For, standing up in the boat,
A man of that grimy boat’s crew hailed them. ‘Our officer asks
You give us your bandages and all you water-casks,
Then run for Bermeo. We’re going to finish this game of pelota.’

Donostia’s captain begged them with tears to escape but the Basques
Would play their game to the end.
They took the bandages, and cursing at his delay
They took the casks that might keep the fires on their ship at bay;
And they rowed back to the Nabara, trailing their blood behind
Over the water, the sunset and crimson ebb of their day.

For two hours more they fought, while Nabara beneath their feet
Was turned to a heap of smouldering scrap-iron. Once again
The flames they had checked a while broke out. When the forward gun
Was hit, they turned about
Bringing the after gun to bear. They fought in pain
And the instant knowledge of death but the waters filling their riven
Ship could not quench the love that fired them. As each man fell
To the deck, his body took fire as if death made visible
That burning spirit. For two more hours they fought, and at seven
They fired their last shell.

Of her officers all but one were dead. Of her engineers
All but one were dead. Of the fifty-two that had sailed
In her, all were dead but fourteen – and each of these half-killed
With wounds. And the night-dew fell in a hush of ashen tears,
And Nabara’s tongue was stilled.
Southward the sheltering havens grew dark, the cliffs and the green
Shallows they knew; where their friends had watched them as the evening wore
To a glowing end, who swore
Nabara must show s white flag now, but saw instead the fourteen
Climb into their matchwood boat and fainting pull for the shore.

Canarias lowered a launch that swept in a greyhound’s curve
Pitiless to pursue
And cut them off. But that bloodless and all-but-phantom crew
Still gave no soft concession to fate: they strung their nerve
For one last fling of defiance, they shipped their oars and threw
Hand-grenades at the launch as it circled about to board them.
But the strength of the hands that had carved them a hold on history
Failed them at last: the grenades fell short of the enemy,
Who grappled and overpowered them,
While Nabara sank by the stern in the hushed Cantabrian sea.

                                    *                   *                      *

They bore not a charmed life. They went into battle foreseeing
Probable loss, and they lost. The tides of Biscay flow
Over the obstinate bones of many, the winds are sighing
Round prison walls where the rest are doomed like their ship to rust –
Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.
Simple men who asked of their life no mythical splendour,
They loved its familiar ways so well that they preferred
In the rudeness if their heart to die rather than to surrender…
Mortal these words and the deed they remember, but cast a seed
Shall flower for an age when freedom is man’s creative word.

Freedom was more than word, more than the base coinage
Of politicians who hiding behind the skirts of peace
They had defiled, gave up that country to rack and carnage.
For whom, indelibly stamped with history’s contempt,
Remains but to haunt the blackened shell of their policies
For these I have told of, freedom was flesh and blood – a mortal
Body, the gun-breech hot to its touch: yet the battle’s height
Raised it to love’s meridian and held it awhile immortal;
And its light through time still flashes like a star’s that has turned to ashes,
Long after Nabara’s passion was quenched in the sea’s heart.

C. Day Lewis

Week 692: You, Andrew Marvell, by Archibald MacLeish

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I think that today’s offering by the American poet Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) is a real sustained tour de force in the way it makes palpable the passage of time by imagining the shadow of night as it crosses the world from east to west. The title is inspired, of course, by the lines in Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘For ever at my back I hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’.

The poem can also be construed as a reflection on the way empires rise and fall, enjoying their moment in the sun before disappearing into the dark of history.

Note the way in which the relative lack of punctuation, the short urgent lines and the constant repetition of ‘And’ all go to create the sense of an unstoppable momentum.

As well as being a poet, MacLeish was an important librarian. Of coure, all librarians are important, but MacLeish was the ninth Librarian of Congress, a post to which he was personally appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Ecbatan (now Ecbatana) an ancient city in what is now Iran.

Kermanshah: another Iranian city.

Palmyra: now we are in Syria.

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on …

Archibald MacLeish

Week 691: Lament for Eorl the Young, by J.R.R.Tolkien

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These are the verses that Aragorn speaks when he and his companions first come to Edoras in the land of Rohan in book two of the ‘Lord of the Rings’, ‘The Two Towers’. He speaks them first, we are told, in the language of Rohan, which Tolkien elsewhere renders as Old English, and then as here in the Common Tongue.

As I have said before (see week 167), I feel that Tolkien is a skilled versifier rather than a poet as we now think of poets, but let us grant that this is at the least very effective pastiche that works perfectly in its context. The lines were inspired by a passage in the Old English poem ‘The Wanderer’, and I thought it would be interesting to include the said passage for comparison. As you will see, the Old English is very similar in its elegiac quality, but a good deal more terse and less lyrical. What you have in Tolkien as an essentially romantic sensibility grafted on to an older, tougher rootstock. The result may not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s certainly nothing else quite like it.

Lament for Eorl the Young

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

J.R.R.Tolkien

From ‘The Wanderer’

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?       Where is the horse? Where the young man?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?                              Where is the giver of treasure?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?                            Where are the seats at the feast?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?                             Where are the revels in the hall?
Eala beorht bune!                                             Alas for the bright cup!
Eala byrnwiga!                                                 Alas for the mailed warrior!
Eala þeodnes þrym!                                          Alas for the prince’s renown!
Hu seo þrag gewat,                                          How that time has passed away,
genap under nihthelm,                                     Dark beneath the cover of night,
swa heo no wære.                                           As if it had never been.

Week 690: As I Was Saying, by Dannie Abse

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Dannie Abse (see also weeks 162 and 308) wrote engaging and accessible verse of which this week’s piece is a good example. I don’t really agree with its sentiments: I tend to think that at least a moderate, amateur-level acquaintance with the natural world’s nomenclature – birds, beasts, plants – should be part of every poet’s kit, and unlike Mr Abse I do know my Butterburs, Lady’s Smocks and even my Stinking Hellebores. But of course one must allow for the fact that others may have very different enthusiasms. I remember when my wife and I were out on a country walk with a small grandson. ‘Why does Grandad keep stopping to look at flowers?’, he demanded. ‘Well, Grandad likes flowers’, said my wife. ‘Oh’. (Dismissively). ‘I like machines’.

As I Was Saying

Yes, madam, as a poet I do take myself seriously,
and, since I have a young, questioning family, I suppose
I should know something about English wild flowers:
the shape of their lives, when this one and that one grows,
how old mythologies attribute strange powers
to this or that other. Urban, I should mug up anew
the pleasant names: Butterbur, Ling and Lady’s Smock,
Jack-by-the-hedge, Cuckoo-pint, and Feverfew,
even the Stinking Hellebore – all in that W.H.Smith book
I could bring home for myself (inscribed to my daughter)
to swot, to know which is this and which that one,
what honours the high cornfield, what the low water,
under the slow-pacing clouds and occasional sun of England.

But no! Done for in the ignorant suburb
I’ll drink Scotch, neurotically stare through glass
at the rainy lawn, at green stuff, nameless birds,
and let my daughter, madam, go to nature class.
I’ll not compete with those nature poets you advance,
some in country dialect, and some in dialogue
with the country – few as calm as their words,
Wordsworth, Barnes, sad John Clare who ate grass.

Dannie Abse

Week 689: The Fiddle and the Drum, by Joni Mitchell

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This week’s offering by the Canadian singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell first appeared in 1969, at a time when American foreigh policy in Vietnam was increasingly being called into question. I think that in its quiet reasonableness, its readiness to give credit for a once noble dream, it is one of Joni’s best compositions, and indeed one of the most effective antiwar songs ever. Of course, any plea by poets or songwriters for peace and moderation inevitably calls into mind Shakespeare’s lines from sonnet 65: ‘How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,/Whose action is no stronger than a flower?’, though Shakespeare was thinking of tyrannical Time rather than human tyranny. How indeed, and yet flowers persist.

It is no doubt hardly necessary to point out that the fiddle here represents concord and the pleasant arts of peace, as opposed to the drum which stands for all that is martial and inflammatory.

The Fiddle and the Drum

And so once again
My dear Johnny, my dear friend
And so once again you are fightin’ us all
And when I ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry and I fall
Oh, my friend, how did you come
To trade the fiddle for the drum?

You say I have turned
Like the enemies you’ve earned
But I can remember all the good things you are
And so I ask you, please
Can I help you find the peace and the star?
Oh, my friend, what time is this
To trade the handshake for the fist?

And so once again
Oh, America, my friend
And so once again you are fighting us all
And when we ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry and we fall
Oh, my friend, how did you come
To trade the fiddle for the drum?

You say we have turned
Like the enemies you’ve earned
But we can remember all the good things you are
And so we ask you, please
Can we help you find the peace and the star?
Oh, my friend, we have all come
To fear the beating of your drum

Joni Mitchell

Week 688: The Fall of Rome, by W.H.Auden

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With so much doom and gloom around at the moment I thought I might as well add to it by opening with this one for the New Year: Auden’s take on the way a civilisation decays, couched partly in terms of the fall of Rome, but also cheerfully anachronistic in places. The message seems to be that things end not with a bang but a whimper: his vision is of a society losing cohesion and a sense of purpose, its culture becoming increasingly divorced from reality, its citizens taking refuge in private recreation and the pursuit of personal gain while crime and corruption flourish and such concepts as honour and duty fall by the wayside. The poem concludes on what may or may not be a consoling note with the thought that elsewhere beyond the human sphere nature continues unaffected on its own indifferent way. It should be borne in mind that this was written in 1945, when there was relatively little concern about man’s impact on the environment; I think if he were writing today Auden would be less sanguine about the ability of the natural world to continue inviolate.

The poem is dense with Auden’s idiosyncratic imagery. I love the image of the reindeer in the last stanza, but worry that it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Why are the reindeer in such a hurry? Reindeer eat moss, so confronted with miles and miles of the stuff wouldn’t they instead be moving rather slowly, chomping as they went?

Fisc: the state treasury.
Cato: Cato the Younger (95 BC – 46 BC), a Roman senator notorious for his belief in the old Roman virtues of stoicism and self-sacrifice, making him a scourge of the late Republic; in the end he committed suicide rather than compromise with what he saw as the tyrannical regime of Julius Caesar. Not to be confused with Cato the Elder (234-149 BC), Cato the Younger’s great-grandfather, who was cut from much the same cloth, and is particularly remembered for his tough line on Carthage with speeches in which he repeatedly urged ‘Carthago delenda est’ (Carthage must be destroyed).
Cerebrotonic: having a personality characterized by shyness, introspection, and emotional restraint. Nice example of a mot juste.

The Fall of Rome

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

W.H.Auden

Week 687: Neither Far Out Nor In Deep, by Robert Frost

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As often with Robert Frost, the simplicity of the language in this week’s poem masks a thought of some profundity. ‘They cannot look out far./They cannot look in deep’ – really one may think that a big-brained ape species that has only been around on the planet for a blink of geological time has done a pretty good job so far of looking out on the universe and fathoming its workings, but no doubt any scientist would agree firstly that there are still a lot of known unknowns we would like answers to, such as the nature of dark matter, and secondly that these in turn are likely to be swamped by the unknown unknowns, the mysteries that so far have been buried too deep or lain too far off for our perception, let alone our understanding. Still, as the poem suggests, we will keep looking, it is in our nature…

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be –
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

Robert Frost

Week 686: From ‘Requiem’, by Anna Akhmatova

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This week an excerpt from another famous poem by the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), for details of whom see week 606. This one, entitled ‘Requiem’, derives from the months she spent in the company of many other women waiting outside Leningrad prison in the hope of seeing their imprisoned loved ones, in Akhmatova’s case her son Lev Gumilev, arrested by the NKVD in 1938.

There are many translations of ‘Requiem’ online, but to me this one stands out for its laconic evocation of anger and pity. I apologise to the translator whose identity I have been unable to discover.

Akhmatova prefixes the poem as a whole with the following prose note:

‘In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison
queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the
queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of
me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and
whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe
this?’ And I said: ‘Yes, I can.’ And then something like the shadow of a
smile crossed what had once been her face.

1 April, 1957, Leningrad

Epilogue

II

Again the hands of the clock are nearing
The unforgettable hour. I see, hear, touch

All of you: the cripple they had to support
Painfully to the end of the line; the moribund;

And the girl who would shake her beautiful head and
Say: ‘I come here as if it were home.’

I should like to call you all by name,
But they have lost the lists….

I have woven for them a great shroud
Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.

I remember them always and everywhere,
And if they shut my tormented mouth,

Through which a hundred million of my people cry,
Let them remember me also….

And if in this country they should want
To build me a monument

I consent to that honour,
But only on condition that they

Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago,

Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,
Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,

But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me

Lest in blessed death I should forget
The grinding scream of the Black Marias,

The hideous clanging gate, the old
Woman wailing like a wounded beast.

And may the melting snow drop like tears
From my motionless bronze eyelids,

And the prison pigeons coo above me
And the ships sail slowly down the Neva.

Anna Akhmatova


Week 685: Merrow Down, by Rudyard Kipling

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This is a poem that Rudyard Kipling wrote in memory of his beloved daughter Josephine, who died aged six from pneumonia, and for whom he composed what were later published as the ‘Just So’ stories, in one of which he appears as a caveman Tegumai and she as his daughter Taffy, an idea continued in these accompanying verses.

You may see the poem as a little whimsical, a little fey; you may find it sentimental: that is your right. As for me, I can only say with King Lear, ‘I am a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward’ and I know what it is to have had a small beloved daughter, though happily not to have lost one. So for my part I must confess to finding the poem intensely affecting: in particular I think the last four lines are perhaps the most moving that Kipling ever wrote.

Merrow Down

                          I

There runs a road by Merrow Down –
A grassy track today it is –
An hour out of Guildford Town
Above the river Wey it is.

Here, when they heard the horse-bells ring,
The ancient Britons dressed and rode
To watch the dark Phoenicians bring
Their goods along the Western Road.

Yes, here, or hereabouts, they met
To hold their racial talks and such –
To barter beads for Whitby jet
And tin for gay shell torques and such.

But long and long before that time
(When bison used to roam on it)
Did Taffy and her Daddy climb
That Down, and had their home on it.

Then beavers build in Broadstonebrook
And made a swamp where Bramley stands,
And bears from Shere would come and look
For Taffimai where Shamley stands.

The Wey, that Taffy called Wagai,
Was more than six times bigger then;
And all the tribe of Tegumai
They cut a noble figure then!

                          II

Of all the tribe of Tegumai
Who cut that figure, none remain, –
On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry –
The silence and the sun remain.

But as the faithful years return
And hearts unwounded sing again,
Come Taffy dancing through the fern
To lead the Surrey spring again.

Her brows are bound with bracken-fronds,
And golden elf-locks fly above;
Her eyes are bright as diamonds
And bluer than the sky above.

In mocassins and deer-skin cloak,
Unfearing, free and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.

For far – oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him!

Rudyard Kipling