Brian and Glenys
As many of you know, Brian and Glenys have left Sherborne. They will no doubt show their faces and will retain the friendships they built over time here in Sherborne. They will always be welcome. I have always valued Brian’s support to the Brook Group. At every call to arms he was there, digging grips and ditches, planting oaks. Brian and I together rediscovered Win’s barrow, a Neolithic burial mound just this side of Clapton, long thought to be positioned elsewhere. Brian and I share a love of the poetry of Edward Thomas, exchanging collections, so the best tribute I can pay Brian is simply an Edward Thomas poem, “The Brook” which magically and remarkably seems to contain several themes I have written about recently and which I know Brian holds dear. Birdsong, butterflies, barrows, and the Brook, its gleam, its motion and voices, its waters running frizzled. A bit of ancient mystery too.
I hope Brian and Glenys remember Sherborne and the Brook's sight and sound with happiness. We know their worth.
The Brook, by Edward Thomas
Seated once by a brook, watching a child
Chiefly that paddled, I was thus beguiled.
Mellow the blackbird sang and sharp the thrush
Not far off in the oak and hazel brush,
Unseen. There was a scent like honeycomb
From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome
Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft
A butterfly alighted. From aloft
He took the heat of the sun, and from below.
On the hot stone he perched contented so,
As if never a cart would pass again
That way; as if I were the last of men
And he the first of insects to have earth
And sun together and to know their worth.
I was divided between him and the gleam,
The motion, and the voices, of the stream,
The waters running frizzled over gravel,
That never vanish and for ever travel.
A grey flycatcher silent on a fence
And I sat as if we had been there since
The horseman and the horse lying beneath
The fir-tree-covered barrow on the heath,
The horseman and the horse with silver shoes,
Galloped the downs last. All that I could lose
I lost. And then the child’s voice raised the dead.
“No one’s been here before” was what she said
And what I felt, yet never should have found
A word for, while I gathered sight and sound.
