Out in the country

It’s pos­sibly one of the least known of the reg­u­lar columns in The Guard­ian, but for the past few weeks I’ve quite often found myself read­ing the Coun­try Diary sec­tion. I guess there’s some truth in the idea that when you live in the city, every now and then you need to exper­i­ence a little of the coun­tryside. Wednesday’s column was about the beau­ti­ful sur­round­ings of Wen­lock Edge in Shrop­shire. I read it this morn­ing, as I rel­ished the rare few moments of sun­light stream­ing through the win­dows of our office:

On Wen­lock Edge
by A.E. Housman

On Wen­lock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the sap­lings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

‘Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yon­der heav­ing hill would stare:
The blood that warms an Eng­lish yeo­man,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The gale, it plies the sap­lings double,
It blows so hard, ‘twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

Pos­sibly through over-familiarity, that poem has now sadly become almost corny. Yet it came to mind as soon as I began to think about Wen­lock Edge, a place I fell in love with many years ago. As a rather unhappy fifteen-year-old, I vis­ited Shrop­shire to take a much-needed break from vari­ous fam­ily trau­mas that were hap­pen­ing at the time. A school­friend who had moved to the area invited me to stay with his fam­ily, and we paid a num­ber of vis­its to the Edge (as the loc­als pos­sibly call it). I’ve always meant to return there again, as I remem­ber it being beau­ti­ful, serene and calm­ing — that is, until the day my friend’s slightly eccent­ric grand­father joined us. It was at this point that I received my intro­duc­tion to A.E. Housman’s poem — in fact, it was unavoid­able, because this seventy-year-old man decided to stand proudly in the middle of the coun­tryside, recit­ing it to us in a loud and the­at­rical voice. That’s not the sort of exper­i­ence you for­get in a hurry. At the time, I was hor­ribly embar­rassed; now, I look back and remem­ber it rather fondly.

If I end up achiev­ing a sim­ilar level of eccent­ri­city, liv­ing in the middle of a rural idyll and read­ing verse aloud in a corn­field (or, indeed, in a pas­ture sur­roun­ded by cows), I’ll be very happy.