Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953; see also weeks 112 and 263) was a rambunctious, opinionated, larger than life figure whose reputation has suffered partly due to his oft expressed dislike of Jews, though it should be said that he abominated Hitler and totally condemned Nazi anti-semitism. Nor was he alone among intellectuals at the time in holding problematic views: T.S.Eliot’s anti-semitic streak has not stopped him from being venerated in certain quarters, nor has H.G.Wells’s enthusiasm for culling non-white races in the name of eugenics inhibited a continuing interest in his fiction. So maybe Belloc too deserves to be cut some slack, and perhaps anyway we should be wary of demonising writers for one unacceptable opinion and should simply reject that opinion while seeing what else they might have to offer. Which in Belloc’s case, as far as poetry goes, is a quantity of skilful, entertaining and sometimes quite edgy light verse, and some pieces like this which hover somewhere between the light and the serious.

Apparently this particular poem was written in reaction to his failure to obtain a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and expresses a defiant scorn for the academia that has rejected him. It seems odd to me that a poet should wish to compromise his independence of mind by too close an assocation with an academic institution, but evidently it was a lifelong disappointment to him. The poem is a bit of a romantic muddle – I would like to know just how high you would have to fly a winged horse to see the English Channel from anywhere near Wantage, and I’m not sure what the cast of the ‘Chanson de Roland’ are doing on the nearby Lambourn Downs – it’s a long way from Roncesvalles. But you have to admit it goes with a swing.

The Winged Horse: this is a reference to Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, ridden by the hero Bellephoron who defeated the monster Chimaera. The point here is that Pegasus is said to have created the spring Hippocrene on Mount Helicon by striking his hoof in the earth, and drinking from the Hippocrene was thought to bring poetic inspiration, which ties in with ‘spouting well of joy’ in the last stanza.

Lambourn: a town in Berkshire famous as a centre for the training of racehorses, which are exercised on the nearby downs.

Roland: hero of the 11^th century Old French epic poem ‘Chanson de Roland’, which is very loosely based on a real historical 8^th century incident. In the poem the French emperor Charlemagne is leading his army back from Spain when its rearguard, under the command of his champion Count Roland, is ambushed in a narrow Pyrenean pass by a large army of Saracens (in reality it was a small army of Basques). Not wanting to be thought a coward, Roland refuses to summon help by blowing his horn, despite the repeated urgings of his friend Oliver (‘Cumpaign Rolland, car sunez vostre corn’, which I like to translate as ‘For f—k’s sake, Roland, just blow the bloody horn!’). As a result the entire rearguard is wiped out, with Roland the last to fall.

Marches: here used in the sense of borderlands – the historical Roland was military governor of the Breton March, responsible for defending Francia‘s frontier against the Bretons.

Turpin: a martial archbishop who fell with Roland, the last of his companions to do so. It may seem odd that a churchman should also be a doughty warrior, but it is well attested that among William the Conqueror’s retinue at the Battle of Hastings was a certain Bishop Odo. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that as his calling forbade him to shed blood, he eschewed the use of a sword and instead bashed people’s brains in with a club. So that was all right.

The Winged Horse

It’s ten years ago today you turned me out o’ doors
To cut my feet on flinty lands and stumble down the shores
And I thought about the all-in-all, oh more than I can tell!
But I caught a horse to ride upon and I rode him very well,
He had flames behind the eyes of him and wings upon his side,
And I ride, and I ride!

I rode him out of Wantage and I rode him up the hill,
And there I saw the Beacon in the morning standing still,
Inkpen and Hackpen and southward and away
High through the middle airs in the strengthening of the day,
And there I saw the channel-glint and England in her pride
And I ride, and I ride!

And once atop of Lambourn Down towards the hill of Clere
I saw the Host of Heaven in rank and Michael with his spear,
And Turpin out of Gascony and Charlemagne the Lord
And Roland of the marches with his hand upon his sword
For the time he should have need of it, and forty more beside
And I ride, and I ride!

For you that took the all-in-all, the things you left were three,
A loud voice for singing and keen eyes to see
And a spouting well of joy that never yet was dried
And I ride.

Hilaire Belloc

My first encounter with this this poem came at the age of thirteen when I heard it declaimed by a sixth-former in assembly, as part of the school’s annual verse-speaking competition. I went home that night and wrote it out from memory – you can do this sort of thing when you are a thirteen year old just awakening to poetry. Sixty years on it’s still there in my mind: my taste may have shifted a bit towards the less overt, but I think we owe some loyalty to our first loves, and I still like it for its associations and for a certain quality of pathos not normally associated with the big bouncy Belloc persona.

The South Country

When I am living in the Midlands
That are sodden and unkind,
I light my lamp in the evening:
My work is left behind;
And the great hills of the South Country
Come back into my mind.

The great hills of the South Country
They stand along the sea;
And it’s there walking in the high woods
That I could wish to be,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Walking along with me.

The men that live in North England
I saw them for a day:
Their hearts are set upon the waste fells,
Their skies are fast and grey;
From their castle-walls a man may see
The mountains far away.

The men that live in West England
They see the Severn strong,
A-rolling on rough water brown
Light aspen leaves along.
They have the secret of the Rocks,
And the oldest kind of song.

But the men that live in the South Country
Are the kindest and most wise,
They get their laughter from the loud surf,
And the faith in their happy eyes
Comes surely from our Sister the Spring
When over the sea she flies;
The violets suddenly bloom at her feet,
She blesses us with surprise.

I never get between the pines
But I smell the Sussex air;
Nor I never come on a belt of sand
But my home is there.
And along the sky the line of the Downs
So noble and so bare.

A lost thing could I never find,
Nor a broken thing mend:
And I fear I shall be all alone
When I get towards the end.
Who will there be to comfort me
Or who will be my friend?

I will gather and carefully make my friends
Of the men of the Sussex Weald;
They watch the stars from silent folds,
They stiffly plough the field.
By them and the God of the South Country
My poor soul shall be healed.

If I ever become a rich man,
Or if ever I grow to be old,
I will build a house with deep thatch
To shelter me from the cold,
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex told.
I will hold my house in the high wood
Within a walk of the sea,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Shall sit and drink with me.

Hilaire Belloc

There is a real Ha’nacker Mill, Halnaker Mill near Chichester in Sussex, and maybe there was a real Sally, but what draws me most to this poem by Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) is its hauntingly prophetic image of what might be called the unpeopling of the countryside. I am old enough to have just caught the last years of a rural way of life now vanished, to remember a time when farms employed whole gangs of workers and an obliging tractor-driver, innocent of health and safety, might give small children a ride on the end of his trailer as it bumped its way across the fields with its harvest load.

Ha’nacker Mill

Sally is gone that was so kindly,
Sally is gone from Ha’nacker Hill
And the Briar grows ever since then so blindly;
And ever since then the clapper is still…
And the sweeps have fallen from Ha’nacker Mill.

Ha’nacker Hill is in Desolation:
Ruin a-top and a field unploughed
And Spirits that call on a fallen nation,
Spirits that loved her calling aloud,
Spirits abroad in a windy cloud.

Spirits that call and no one answers —
Ha’nacker’s down and England’s done.
Wind and Thistle for pipe and dancers,
And never a ploughman under the Sun:
Never a ploughman. Never a one.

Hilaire Belloc