No Rocky I’ll be here for quite some time and you and I can talk often about the words :-) The Windhover is incredible in it intensity and in the love that GMH put into it. You’re right about the way the mouth moves when one says his poetry out loud—it’s a marvellous sensual experience in many ways as well as a spiritual one. I’ve always read poetry out loud—I instinctively feel it’s how it should be experienced—If one reads Ulysses or the Odyssey or Iliad out loud the experience of those great works intensifies and a person becomes one with the author and the singing voice rushes forth in all its splendour. Gods but I love the language. I thank the gods of fortune that I had Jesuit teachers for the love they expanded in me for the words. I too love Pied Beauty. And I love this one too: It has the hint of the ballad to it :-) Inversnaid THIS darksome burn, horseback brown, His rollrock highroad roaring down, In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home. A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth Turns and twindles over the broth Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning, It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning. Degged with dew, dappled with dew, Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn. What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. Write me if you will if you discover a new poem that intrigues—I love to share the words :-)

Another favourite from GMH—thought you might like to see it :-) NOTHING is so beautiful as spring — When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling. What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning