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Jack Lovejoy

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Morning in the Pyrenees

The celebrated beauty of the view
Was so transmuted by the morning mist
An age of myth seemed newly to exist;
And as if some enchantment had come true,
Bewitching images came bursting through.

Imagination rallied to amend
The disillusionments of yesterday;
And as the drift of vapours burned away,
I saw a path romantically ascend
The slopes a poet wandered with a friend.

Above them rose a crest of looming pines,
Of mountain oaks that lift their arms on high
In supplication to a pagan sky;
Of vagrant roses and the gnarled vines
Of vineyards ripening to rustic wines;

Of streams that fall and pause and fall again,
To dash themselves to spindrift and to spill
Through woods where hamadryads may live still,
And lazily meander down the plain
Past fields of citruses and golden grain;

A land that bends in rhythm to the breeze,
As if in cadences the forest nods
To music in the halls of dancing gods.
A chorus of cicadas in the trees;
The lilt of songbirds and the hum of bees.

Nearby the pension like an unkept grave,
Where amber sunbeams fugitively shone,
There stood an island of volcanic stone.
A waterfall beyond it seems to rave
With ivy-muffled bellows from a cave.

Once two young men* from England tarried there,
And talked of Wellington and Charlemagne,
Of Roland and the tyranny in Spain,
And of the poetry they both held dear;
And swam at noon in waters fresh and clear.

*Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) and Arthur Hallam (1811-33).

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