An unrepining guest,
Who now, dear heart, is young for your eternity.


CRAGWELL END

I

There's nothing I know of to make you spend
A day of your life at Cragwell End.
It's a village quiet and grey and old,
A little village tucked into a fold
(A sort of valley, not over wide)
Of the hills that flank it on either side.
There's a large grey church with a square stone tower,
And a clock to mark you the passing hour
In a chime that shivers the village calm
With a few odd bits of the 100th psalm.
A red-brick Vicarage stands thereby,
Breathing comfort and lapped in ease,
With a row of elms thick-trunked and high,
And a bevy of rooks to caw in these.

'Tis there that the Revd. Salvyn Bent
(No tie could be neater or whiter than _his_ tie)
Maintains the struggle against dissent,
An Oxford scholar _ex Aede Christi_;
And there in his twenty-minute sermons
He makes mince-meat of the modern Germans,
Defying their _apparatus criticus_