Lives in Cricket No 18 - FR Foster

Remembrances Summer’s pleasures they are gone like to visions every one, And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on. I tried to call them back, but unbidden they are gone Far away from heart and eye and for ever far away. Dear heart, and can it be that such raptures meet decay? I thought them all eternal when by Langley Bush I lay, I thought them joys eternal when I used to shout and play On its bank at ‘clink and bandy’, ‘chock’ and ‘taw’ and ‘ducking stone’, Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own Like a ruin of the past all alone. When I used to lie and sing by old Eastwell’s boiling spring, When I used to tie the willow boughs together for a swing, And fish with crooked pins and never catch a thing, With heart just like a feather, now a heavy as a stone; When beneath old Lea Close Oak I the bottom branches broke To make our harvest cart like so many working folk, And then to cut a straw at the brook to have a soak. Oh, I never dreamed of parting or that trouble had a sting, Or that pleasures like a flock of birds would ever take to wing, Leaving nothing but a little naked spring. Here was commons for their hills, where they seek for freedom still, Though every common’s gone and though traps are set to kill The little homeless miners – oh, it turns my bosom chill When I think of old Sneap Green, Puddock’s Nook and Hilly Stow, Where bramble bushes grew and the daisy gemmed in dew And the hills of silken grass like to cushions to the view, Where we threw the pismire crumbs when we’d nothing else to do, All levelled like a desert by the never-weary plough, All vanish’d like the sun where that cloud is passing now And settled here for ever on its brow. Oh, I never thought that joys would run away from boys, Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such summer joys; But alack, I never dreamed that the world had other toys To petrify first feeling like the fable into stone, Till I found the pleasure past and a winter come at last, Then the fields were sudden bare and the sky got overcast, And boyhood’s pleasing haunts, like a blossom in the blast, Was shrivelled to a withered weed and trampled down and done, Till vanished was the morning spring and set the summer sun, And winter fought her battle strife and won. John Clare (1793-1864) 5