Morning In Norfolk

As it has for so long come wind and all weather the house glimmers among the mists of a little river that splinters, it seems, a landscape of winter dreams. In the far fields stand a few bare trees decorating those mists like the fanned patterns of Georgian skylights. The home land of any heart persists there, suffused with memories and mists not quite concealing the identities and lost lives of those loved once but loved most. They haunt it still. To the watermeadows that lie by the heart they return as do flocks of swallows to the fields they have known and flickered and flown so often and so unforgettably over. What fish play in the bright wishing wells of your painted stretches, O secret untainted little Bure, I could easily tell, for would they not be those flashing dashers the sometimes glittering presentiments, images and idealizations of what had to be? The dawn has brightened the shallows and shadows and the Bure sidles and idles through weed isles and fallen willows, and under Itteringham Mill, and there is a kind of rain- drenched flittering in the air, the night swan still sleeps in her wings and over it all the dawn heaps up the hanging fire of the day. Fowell's tractor blusters out of its shed and drags a day's work, like a piled sled behind it. The crimson December morning brims over Norfolk, turning to burning Turner this aqueous water colour idyll that earlier gleamed so green that it seemed drowned. What further sanction, what blessing can the man of heart intercede for than the supreme remission of dawn? For then the mind looking backward upon its too sullied yesterday, the rotting stack of resolution and refuse, reads in the rainbowed sky a greater covenant, the tremendous pronouncement: the day forgives. Holy the heart in its proper occupation praising and appraising this godsend, the dawn. Will you lift up your eyes my blind spirit and see such evidence of forgiveness in the heavens morning after golden morning than even the blind can see?