Winter Landscape

Between Uffington and Fernham, at the edge of a ditch filled with reeds. I am put in mind of a poem I wrote, ages ago now, it seems...

 

REED

 

I followed her, cloven hooves a-clattering,

The woman, goddess with the bow of horn,

Mountain shales my cleft feet scattering.

She answered, “No!” and laughed my love to scorn.

 

Down the slopes to the sandy Ladon’s edge,

Slowly flowing, and lush with water-weed,

I snorted madly, trampling marshland sedge;

She sighed, and turned herself into a reed.

 

The lonely bittern boomed, the woodcock cried,

My horned brow bristled beneath my crown,

“Where has she gone? For I would make her bride!

Is she a nymph, or did she sink and drown?”

 

I heard her sigh, the rattle of her beads;

I clutched at her, plunging in my lust –

My hairy hand, it grasped at nought but reeds.

They sighed and rattled with each windy gust.

 

“This much I’ll take!” I cried, and seized my knife;

The reeds I cut, and Syrinx-pipes I made.

The woman, who refused to be my wife,

Yet sighs and sings; her voice shall never fade.

 

Source material: The story of Pan and Syrinx, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book I, lines 689-712.

 

Done