I Leant Upon A Coppice Gate

I saw some blackbirds on the snowy grass tonight, pecking their way through the cold and looking so beautiful! Winter is really here and, above the climate-change-babble, it's obvious that the climate changes have nothing whatsoever to do with how we live and everything to do with being attuned to Nature in all her seasons. I guess that's what happens in a world dominated by linear thinking. The earth, like people, has its cycles and seasons and, thinking in a cyclic way, it all makes more sense. Some people have made a fortune from the climate scam and others have run like sheep after the lie, but at the end of the day, the seasons change and we change with them when we drop that need to control everything and everyone.

I find Thomas Hardy's books depressing and verbose (with his obsession with describing the details of architecture!) but his poetry is something else altogether....like this:

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited ;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.