Watercolor Of Grantchester Meadows

There, spring lambs jam the sheepfold. In air

Stilled, silvered as water in a glass

Nothing is big or far.

The small shrew chitters from its wilderness

Of grassheads and is heard.

Each thumb-sized bird

Fits nimble-winged in thickets, and of good color.

Cloudrack and owl-hollowed willows slanting over

The bland Granta double their white and green

World under the sheer water

And ride that flux at anchor, upside down.

The punter sinks his pole.

In Byron's pool

Cattails part where the tame cygnets steer.

It is a country on a nursery plate.

Spotted cows revolve their jaws and crop

Red clover or gnaw beetroot

Bellied on a nimbus of sun-glazed buttercup.

Hedging meadows of benign

Arcadian green

The blood-berried hawthorn hides its spines with white.

Droll, vegetarian, the water rat

Saws down a reed and swims from his limber grove,

While the students stroll or sit,

Hands laced, in a moony indolence of love —-

Black-gowned, but unaware

How in such mild air

The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out.