This poem was first published in Penguin New Writing 28 in July 1946, and as such constitutes Brooke’s first commercial, artistic publication. He had previously self-published Six Poems while at Oxford in 1928, and his second volume of poetry, December Spring, appeared from the Bodley Head later in 1946.
Walking on the Autumn hillsides
Above the ruined town,
The grey skies oppressing
The mind with weight of sadness,
The country unfolding, hill
Upon piled-up hill, the vineyards
Heavy with fruit, but the farms
Untenanted or unfriendly;
Walking the rain-wet paths
By the orchards, the pink houses,
The Jewish burial-ground—
At the turn of the the hedged pathway,
A soldier stopped me, grinning—
White teeth and ginger tash—
Wanting to know the time;
A Sapper on bomb-disposal,
Sweating, stripped to the waist,
Friendly in a sad country:
Preparing the ground for peace.
And walking on in the rain
Through the windless Autumn country,
I held Time in my hand—
The caged and static moment,
Poised between Summer’s ending
And threat of starveling Winter;
The hour of transition,
An epoch’s climacteric—
The time of migrations
And the tribal movement;
War’s easy summer climate
Unsettled now by rumour
Of leafless, difficult peace;
Our age’s equinox
Coming with the soft rain,
The young grass in the hedgerow
And the Sapper’s naked smile
In an unfriendly country.
And I shall remember
In stripped and winter future
This rain and the hedged pathway,
The moment held in the hand:
The soldier’s smile at the frontier
Friendly in the knife-edged moment
Dividing the two climates:
Our Summer threatened by peace
And War becoming Winter.
Jocelyn Brooke, first published in Penguin New Writing 28, ed. John Lehmann, July 1946.