The title of John Clare’s poem, from which these are the opening lines, explains its theme. The Northamptonshire man wrote it somewhere between 1809 and 1835 but its message is timeless.

THE ETERNITY OF NATURE

THE title of John Clare’s poem, from which these are the opening lines, explains its theme. The Northamptonshire man wrote it somewhere between 1809 and 1835 but its message is timeless.

THE ETERNITY OF NATURE

Leaves, from eternity, are simple things

To the world’s gaze – whereto a spirit clings

Sublime and lasting. Trampled under foot

The daisy lives, and strikes its little root

Into the lap of time: centuries come

And pass away into the silent tomb,

And still the child, hid in the womb of time,

Shall smile and pluck them, when this simple rhyme

Shall be forgotten, like a churchyard stone,

Or lingering lie unnoticed and alone.

When eighteen hundred years, our common date,

Grow many thousands in their marching state,

Ay, still the child, with pleasure in his eye,

Shall cry – the daisy! a familiar cry –

And run to pluck it, in the self-same state

As when Time found it in his infant date;

And, like a child himself, when all was new,

Might smile with wonder, and take notice too,

Its little golden bosom, frilled with snow,

Might win e’en Eve to stoop adown, and show

Her partner, Adam, in the silky grass

This little gem that smiled where pleasure was,

And loving Eve, from Eden followed ill,

And bloomed with sorrow, and lives smiling still,

As once in Eden under heaven’s breath,

So now on earth, and on the lap of death

It smiles for ever. – Cowslips of gold bloom,

That in the pasture and the meadow come,

Shall come when kings and empires fade and die;

And in the closen, as Time partners, lie

As fresh two thousand years to come as now,

With thosefive crimson spots upon their brow.