The Lob in line 33 is the quintessential English countryman, wonderfully memorialized in Edward Thomas's poem, "Lob."
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In a lane on August afternoons of heat
And stillness, wandering to see what’s seen
But often not, pausing beside a wall
Grown stooped and crocked beneath its ancient sheen
Of lichened dust, I’d cast a clout at time
To tell what steps or stumbles might upend
My feet that twelve months gone, back-bent and lame,
I’d limp a gaffer before that wall, unmend
And cored by age, but time did not oblige.
The starlings, tits and goldfinch at their chatter,
The wall’s-foot vetch and purple knapweed, dosed
By sun, all shrugged that this was not their matter:
But the wall, a dusty glow of flints, though mute,
Blinked out a challenge from its eyes of flint.
Those flints! Obsidian-black, beer brown, mist white,
Some blotched like fat in sausage, some with a glint
Like blood-dark liver, some deep-clouded like
Piled clotted cream: white pudding, bran-thick dough,
Stained hearts of fresh-felled oak! Lens-smooth though creased
By ridges left when they were flaked by a blow,
They’re knife-edge sharp to blood an unwise finger –
That drying smear across the flints’ flat gleam
Hinting at depths of man and history:
The struggling on, the deaths, the flesh-torn teem
Of war; deeper again, blindly in the flints’
Unyielding stare, rock-strut geology’s
Ungraspable regress to ages where
Stark dust and stone, unconscious, warred the seas.
Oh, it’s like plunging through unbounded cloud,
Particularity, all human goods,
Depersonalized to chemistry’s chance bond –
Chiaroscuro unfooting men in its voids.
No, better far to run a poor Lob’s hand
Across the wall’s warm mortar, pit and stibbled
By hueless lichens, drained by sun, the mortar
Like parchment of an old man’s fist gone gribbled
By years, friendly to the palm as a hunch of bread.
What though am I, at Bible age, but one
Who waits his desiccation, strewn as dust
In some nearby field, there with water and sun
To nourish woundwort, spurge or yellow oxlip?
Well, time will turn its back and fate will yawn,
Although the flints, insolent in their glance,
A-glim in sunlight like a window thrown,
Stir up regret at what I cannot do
But would: their clumped resolve that though all things
Decay, swept up into the world’s piled rubble,
They’ll flash, as when at dusk a last bird sings.
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© July 2019
