Lancaut

Lancaut

Lines composed a few miles below Tintern Abbey.

This is not a place for people

To romp about in.

Wander quietly by the Wye

On sufferance.

Lancaut does not belong to us

But to the river.  

The sheep and the crows are

At home here, and we intrude.

The heron looks and thinks and then has second thoughts,

And decides he really ought to fly,

To a rendez-vous up-river Monmouth way,

Though he really shouldn’t have promised to go.

He sighs and lazily takes off and slowly flaps

Along his flight path northwards

A foot or so above the flowing runway of the Wye.

We intrude, so go softly past

The chapel of St James,

A ruin now,

Just four walls with windows,

Though the gables still stand proudly high.

Here hymns used to ring up to the roof,

Long since fallen in,

And villagers would come by horse, or by boat

If the tides of the Wye were right.

Now silence rules; no hymns, no psalms,

No mumbled responses,

No yawns in the sermon that did go on,

And on.

There is a seat up on the hill

Above the chapel and the stile

And sitting there you can breathe the scene

If you stop and rest a while.