What do you think?
Rate this book
Earth Memories
In 1931, after two decades of wandering the world, Llewelyn Powys moved into an isolated cottage in Dorset, where he embarked on a series of essays embracing what he called 'the poetry of life'. In their evocations of land and sea, of childhood and old age, of wildlife, they are a poignant love letter to the English Countryside.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1935
7 people are currently reading
77 people want to read
About the author
Llewelyn Powys
63 books15 followersLlewelyn Powys was an English novelist and essayist. He was the younger brother of the writers John Cowper Powys and T.F. Powys and a descendent of the poet William Cowper.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 17, 2015
A quiet voice saying "we be as leaves"
January 9, 2024
Llewelyn Powys's Earth Memories is actually a selection of nature-inspired essays from three earlier collections: the original Earth Memories (1934); Dorset Essays (1935); and Somerset Essays (1937). They make for an inordinately pleasant reading experience, as Powys will suddenly launch into the realms of philosophy inspired by the everyday reality around him, as this excerpt from "Somerset Names" shows:
Yet how could the words 'in your generation' be understood by me in the careless heyday of my youth? Nobody under the age of thirty years ever truly comprehends the brevity of human life. It is not until we have lived for over half a century that the ephemeral nature of our existence really becomes lodged in our feckless heads. When Apollo and Poseidon were being cheated of their proper wage by the father of Priam after they had sweated the very fat off their bones at building the great walls of Troy, the Sun God remarked petulantly to the great Sea God, 'Why should we stand there haggling any longer, or indeed have anything whatever to do with this contemptible race which lasts no longer than leaves!'Llewelyn Powys is one of three brothers whose writings are worth exploring, the other two being John Cowper Powys and T F Powys.
December 25, 2024
4.5 stars rounded up to 5. An unjustly buried diamond! Available on Internet Archive: ISBN 9781908213228.
The essays in the first half of the volume are the best, but only because they treat of more general or philosophical topics, while those in the second half include several sketches of people and places in Dorset that are less engrossing. Throughout, the writing is vivid and excellent, with sensuous, flowing and pleasantly alliterative prose. Here he recounts a trip to Venice after being diagnosed with tuberculosis:
"A Struggle for Life"
p 20: Every time I coughed, with a sickening sense of impending physical disaster, I tasted corruption, as though at its very center my body harbored some foul mildew.
pp 23-24: "They doctors can mend ye, Master Llewelyn," he said, "but they cannot cure ye; patch ye up for the summer maybe, but you'll soon be wearing a green coat for all thick there syrup ye sip."
pp 30-31: Apparently the houses across the street from my hotel were occupied by light women of the town. I used to watch them tiring themselves at their mirrors all through the hot summer afternoons. It was depressing to contemplate the shallow monotony of their existence. Sometimes one or other of them would come to the window and look out in the direction of the Cathedral, and I used to wonder in what manner they regarded that ornamental monument which had known so many of their kind pace backwards and forwards over the echoing paving-stones so far below its spiral pinnacles. I had no idea that the girls had marked my presence or troubled their dilatory heads about me one way or the other. However, when the doctor at length allowed me to get up they crowded to their window-sills like so many colored birds in an aviary and began clapping their hands, overjoyed at my recovery. I waved and threw kisses at each one of them in turn. I don't believe I have ever received a demonstration of affection that has touched me more to the heart than this display from these daughters-of-joy, the tedium and frivolity of whose existence I had been witnessing for so many weeks.
p 31: Once more I concentrated my whole attention upon fighting my sickness, resting and regulating my walks and being nourished with bowls of fresh creamy milk, the rich produce of the half-dozen cows I used to watch each summer moving placidly about through buttercups and shadowed grass, as I lay on my boy-scout bed at the top of the terrace walk not far from the phloxes, the fragrance of which on sultry August afternoons, always seemed to suggest in its delicate luxuriance, the sun-warmed velvet-soft abdomens of peacock butterflies.
p 32: I sailed round Africa by the Cape of Good Hope, my zest for life seeming to be keener than ever as I handled the flying fish which in the early morning would sometimes get stranded on the deck near where I lay. I used to stand at the end of the vessel and watch an albatross which followed our course, sweeping backwards and forwards with tireless white wings outspread. And then I would cough, and as the morsel of colored spittle was caught in the dark rollers of that vast ocean over which the bird was flying, I would marvel at the tenacity of this sickness which it was my destiny to carry about with me to the ends of the world.
"The Partridge"
p 37: To be alive, only to be alive! Here is the praise, the wonder, and the glory! Far off over the hills a dog was barking. Above my head a bat flickered; while against the dim clouds, uttering its dolorous deep-sea cry, a herring gull was flying with concentrated purpose towards the chalk cliffs. Could anything be more mysterious, more miraculous than life?
"On the Other Side of the Quantocks"
p 44: As is so often the case with the very young, the agitations of her soul would communicate themselves directly to her body, so that if you were holding her hand when she was troubled, you would feel it vibrant and trembling like a minnow freshly taken from the net.
p 50: It was the garden birds twittering in the clematis outside her window that made up my mother's last impression of earth life.
"The Yellow Iris"
p 61: If through the channels of our homely senses we learn to envisage with imagination the movement and murmurs of life in our moment of time, we become confederates with eternity. With so proud a purpose before us all extravagant anthropocentric hopes appear irrelevant, and we grow content to contemplate with philosophic detachment the flux of creation as it is presented to our eyes, nose, ears, moths, skins.
p 63: Until we are satisfied with the plain miracle of life, with the plain miracle of what is, and make no further clamor, we will remain restless, froward, dissatisfied. True religion consists in a simple worship of life without stipulations.
"Natural Happiness"
p 66: Man alone has been partial to discontent; the slugs even show complacence as, with silent secret perspicacity, they draw towards the undefended seedlings of their appetites.
p 67: The priest rises to bless us with pontifical fingers punctiliously arranged, and his large claim provokes no protest. We do not see him as a direct representative of sacerdotal Egypt, an obsolete witch-doctor out of the remote past, invoking the aid of beings that have never existed except in the bewildered dreams of savages.
pp 67-68: With bellies full of the blood and flesh of fellow animals we stand up to practice self-interested pieties, the claws on our fingers carefully disguised with gloves.
pp 72-73: To listen for a moment to the wind as it stirs the leaves of our garden trees, and to realize that this murmur was troubling earth vegetation before men were, and will be troubling it when they have gone, is to take knowledge of the breath of the infinite. It is a mystery, a sign for everyone, this movement of the planet's atmosphere. It dislodges the dust in the belfry where the owl stares and a loose board rattles. The nettles grouped by the farmyard wall sway to it, and in wide open spaces its music is not lost. No message comes through our senses but is full of worship - the taste of brown bread and red wine, the smell of a field of dazzling charlock, the sight of swallows sweeping back and forth over the tilted roof of a barn, the cool fair flesh of a young girl's body, the liquid song of a blackbird in the white twilight of the longest day.
p 73: We can do nothing better than to fling our bodies and souls before the god of life, passionately and without reserves, as oblations of golden wine are thrown from a cup.
"A Grave in Dorset"
p 83: Immediately before me there trod an aged laborer in a coat black as the feathered back of a cow. With a smell of dusty horse-dung rising from the road I looked at the neck of this old man, so deeply wrinkled with "noughts and crosses" wrinkles, and thought of his father and his father's father, who had all probably worn this same black braided garment on a hundred such occasions. Wherever a man lives there also is sorrow. I continued to follow the elmwood coffin almost hidden under its burden of bluebells, buttercups, pink campions, and branches of May blossoms.
"When the Unicorn 'Cons' the Waters"
p 100: We stand before the throne of life sullen and dull. So blunt is the apprehension of most of us that we are content to spend our priceless and peculiar hours in a state of anesthesia put upon us by a fatal herd hypnotism.
p 100: You are alive. Millions and millions of your kind who have lived upon earth are now dead. Millions and millions who will live upon the earth will be dead; and yet any old man dozing in the sun is at this instant relishing his dot of time out of eternity.
pp 100-101: We are every day betrayed by the blank stare of custom. The commonplace accessories of commonplace people weigh us down. We accept life on its surface value. The Jubilee clock, a newspaper fluttering against a beach chair, a banana skin half buried in the sand - to an enlightened mind even such objects of actuality can be compelled to render up their poetic essences. The Jubilee clock, so expert an example of its complacent period, is tracing out now, very now, upon its bland white face your own apportioned interval of gladness and sorrow. The tattered news-sheet, for all its depressing ordinary look, is composed of an adroit web of fibrous matter from the forest trees of the Labrador. The skin of this fruit was of this very shape and texture when Babylon was being built.
"A Locust Message"
pp 104-105: Life freely scattered in every direction over the earth's surface, life with no other covenant but to live! - the goldfinch schooled to pilfer the seeds of the thistle, the flea to explore the dorsal spines of the drowsy hedgehog!
pp 105-107: The alien intelligence of my fancy would be aware of the astronomical constitution of time, with its past, present, and future as one. In every city, in every hundred, in every village, he would see the procession of the generations; in deserts and on grazing grounds; by seashore and by forest glade, he would mark the ephemeral populations springing up like young corn, only a few years later to be rotting out of sight. He would see these violent and obstinate breeds, ignorant, prejudiced, self-obsessed, fretting away their moments, drinking, fornicating, grasping at possessions, and begetting children in wide marriage beds. He would see them hanging themselves, drowning themselves, cutting their throats. He would see them spending their years in obedient acquiescence, sowing seeds, weaving linen, harvesting, contriving tricks for rapidly traveling upon wheels, or manipulating the wavelength of the planet's atmosphere for the transference of sound, swift as light. He would see them in gala houses, content to watch pantomimes of their lives, with artificial lights slanting down upon hand-constructed stages, with acted commentaries upon their own existence scrupulously presented, puny, pitiful, passing. He would see them standing at the corners of streets, taking all for granted at the point of weariness, or seated at luxurious tables, picking out olives with fingernails pink and polished, or peeling off the outer foliage of artichoke flowers, their eyes covertly aware of each other's naked bodies artfully concealed.
Again he would see them very grave, inordinately grave, thronging into assemblies, arguing, demonstrating, full of confidence: self-righteous reformers, pompous and important, they themselves and their causes signifying nothing in fifty years. He would see them crowding into houses of prayer, partaking of barbarous rites with superstitious unction; and a fortnight later at the grave's side with tears streaming down from heads that will be bare skulls in no time at all. He would see them as lovers sharing with the hog, the stoat, and the midge the tremulous and mysterious thrill of creation, boys and girls wandering by the edges of rye-fields, wandering in copses sun-sheltered by hazel-nut foliage tender and thin, the green light through the horizontal leaf plates telling of the fairylands of their dreams. As men and women went to and fro, loving and hating, laboring and cheating, he would listen to their talk and hear them numbering the stars in the heavens, hear them cataloguing their philosophic speculations, hear them meditating upon certain legends and rumors of earth-interested gods.
"The Genius of Peter Breughel"
p 111: If we could live our lives again, with what eagerness and zest would we not eat great yellow custards, go to bed with our brides, and caper light of heel down the village street!
"Natural Worship"
pp 118-119: It is from this natural awe that we come to learn that in every breath a man breathes from the chrisom to the shroud there is a sacramental quality. And always it is through the senses, our rabble senses of delight, that this religious mood is quickened.
"A Butterfly Secret"
pp 126-127: There is only one way to take life, and this we may learn from any common-white butterfly flitting from flower-head to flower-head, from strawberry plant to strawberry plant, content with the sunshine of a summer's day. Yesterday as I rested on the side of a tumulus I witnessed the lovemaking of two lesser-blues, who were lodged on a long grass which itself was supported by the stalk of a knapweed. Their heads were turned in opposite directions, the one looking towards the sea, the other towards a great inland valley. Their curled trunks below their soft spotted ornamented wings were united, and one could not but marvel at the rare creative genius that could have devised so delicate an expression for these lovely insects to enjoy, on the end of a tasseled grass.
"An Ancient French House"
p 148: Near the door was the stoup for the holy water, now half full of owls' pellets.
"Gypsies"
p 194: Do gypsies appeal perhaps to something incorrigibly antinomian in all of our natures so that we find it unsettling to our acquired docilities to meet in a woodland glade a people who have never acknowledged social obligations, who have been consistently indifferent to ethical systems, who have won the freedom from convention that we secretly crave, and, who, more than any of us, may be said to belong to the great many-breasted earth-mother?
"Poxwell Stone Circle"
p 213: It would soon, as those interminable periods went by and the employments of hunting and berry-gathering were abandoned for the more stable occupations of domesticating animals, that human reliance on magic steadily gave place to forms of religious confidence.
"Dorset Cliff Foxes"
pp 227-228: Never do I hear the husky yelp of a fox without a feeling of exultation that these darlings of Dionysus, diminutive russet wolves of the fells and fields, are still abroad in England. What a sound it is on a frosty night ringing through a bare thorn hedge behind which one of these outlaws, with slender mandibles and sensitive black nostrils, is foraging amongst the tooth-scraped roots near a sheepfold on the chance of finding on the frozen ground of mud and flints a ewe's afterbirth.
"Easter in Dorset"
p 230: If a religious faith had been evolved with no other obligation than to satisfy the innocent longings of the human heart it could hardly have fallen upon a doctrine more reassuring than that the actual bodies of those we love should rise again from the lonely grave in glorified forms.
The essays in the first half of the volume are the best, but only because they treat of more general or philosophical topics, while those in the second half include several sketches of people and places in Dorset that are less engrossing. Throughout, the writing is vivid and excellent, with sensuous, flowing and pleasantly alliterative prose. Here he recounts a trip to Venice after being diagnosed with tuberculosis:
During those strangely exciting weeks I never for a moment was unaware of the presence of my dread complaint. When before breakfast I stalked out into the garden for the pleasure of watching the lizards chase each other behind the rose bushes trained to grow against the hot white wall of the hotel I knew of it. And again I knew of it when during languid summer nights we drifted along the canals with dark water, so startlingly evocative of the smells of an obscure antiquity, lapping against the bottom of our gondola and against the green-stained masonry of walls and stairways, the supporting piles of which had been laid in place on the muddy rush-grown bottom of an open lagoon, so many years ago. On one occasion I saw a young Venetian girl, her head covered with a black lace shawl, eating a bunch of red currants on the steps of a marble palace, and even then I did not forget; no, nor when, from the merciless meshes of a fisherman's net, I disentangled the hard crinkled body of a sea horse, so exquisitely manufactured, and now left to perish on hot Adriatic sands. ("A Struggle for Life")Earth memories are the memories of earth life. Powys' evocative prose succeeds in making the familiar strange, in restoring wonder:
A few seconds scrutiny of a frog, in all its perfection, corrects us of that gross apathy with which we too often approach the miracle of our fugitive existence. Use and wont make all life a commonplace thing. Our ordinary minds demand an ordinary world and feel at ease only when they have explained and taken for granted the mysteries among which we have been given so short a license to breathe. Imagine the sense of wonder that would possess our spirits had we been suddenly transported to the earth from some planet undisturbed by the urge of life. We should exclaim as much over a little hip-frog as over a thumb-high whelp of a hippogriff surprised under a dock leaf. We should then no longer be blind to the planet's mystery latent in wood and stone. A sea-gull's feather picked up would shock us into the excitement we now should feel at finding the pinion of an errant cherubim. We should stand still as a stock to contemplate so slender a quill of air-filled horn which, with its filaments of adhering thistledown, can fan the heavy bodies of animals buoyant through the air. At every step we took we should be startled afresh. ("A Pond")Powys is convinced that this earthly existence is the only one we will be privileged to enjoy, but he resists nihilism:
Life is its own justification. There is no other aim to it, no other meaning, no other purpose, and if we think otherwise, we are foolish. Let the truth be spoken. Each one of us, each intellectual soul among us, advances steadily and surely towards the grave. [...] Every religion is as brittle as an empty snail shell in dry weather, as quick to disappear as cuckoo-spit in a summer hedge that conceals at its center no green fly. The secret to be remembered is that nothing matters, nothing but the momentary consciousness of each individual as he opens his eyes upon a spectacle that knows nought of ethics. Let us, as best we may, reconcile our minds to the fact that all our self-imposed tasks, our political engineering, our brave talk have actually, under the shadow of Eternity, no consequence. Our idealism is treacherous. It is a moonshine path over a deep sea. We are cursed souls each one of us and resemble nothing so much as jackdaws flying about the radiant cliffs of God pretending to be sea-gulls.
And yet there is no cause to despair. Merely to have come to consciousness at all constitutes an inestimable privilege. The past is nothing, the future is nothing, the eternal now alone is of moment. This is understood well by every living creature but man. ("A Butterfly Secret")
"A Struggle for Life"
p 20: Every time I coughed, with a sickening sense of impending physical disaster, I tasted corruption, as though at its very center my body harbored some foul mildew.
pp 23-24: "They doctors can mend ye, Master Llewelyn," he said, "but they cannot cure ye; patch ye up for the summer maybe, but you'll soon be wearing a green coat for all thick there syrup ye sip."
pp 30-31: Apparently the houses across the street from my hotel were occupied by light women of the town. I used to watch them tiring themselves at their mirrors all through the hot summer afternoons. It was depressing to contemplate the shallow monotony of their existence. Sometimes one or other of them would come to the window and look out in the direction of the Cathedral, and I used to wonder in what manner they regarded that ornamental monument which had known so many of their kind pace backwards and forwards over the echoing paving-stones so far below its spiral pinnacles. I had no idea that the girls had marked my presence or troubled their dilatory heads about me one way or the other. However, when the doctor at length allowed me to get up they crowded to their window-sills like so many colored birds in an aviary and began clapping their hands, overjoyed at my recovery. I waved and threw kisses at each one of them in turn. I don't believe I have ever received a demonstration of affection that has touched me more to the heart than this display from these daughters-of-joy, the tedium and frivolity of whose existence I had been witnessing for so many weeks.
p 31: Once more I concentrated my whole attention upon fighting my sickness, resting and regulating my walks and being nourished with bowls of fresh creamy milk, the rich produce of the half-dozen cows I used to watch each summer moving placidly about through buttercups and shadowed grass, as I lay on my boy-scout bed at the top of the terrace walk not far from the phloxes, the fragrance of which on sultry August afternoons, always seemed to suggest in its delicate luxuriance, the sun-warmed velvet-soft abdomens of peacock butterflies.
p 32: I sailed round Africa by the Cape of Good Hope, my zest for life seeming to be keener than ever as I handled the flying fish which in the early morning would sometimes get stranded on the deck near where I lay. I used to stand at the end of the vessel and watch an albatross which followed our course, sweeping backwards and forwards with tireless white wings outspread. And then I would cough, and as the morsel of colored spittle was caught in the dark rollers of that vast ocean over which the bird was flying, I would marvel at the tenacity of this sickness which it was my destiny to carry about with me to the ends of the world.
"The Partridge"
p 37: To be alive, only to be alive! Here is the praise, the wonder, and the glory! Far off over the hills a dog was barking. Above my head a bat flickered; while against the dim clouds, uttering its dolorous deep-sea cry, a herring gull was flying with concentrated purpose towards the chalk cliffs. Could anything be more mysterious, more miraculous than life?
"On the Other Side of the Quantocks"
p 44: As is so often the case with the very young, the agitations of her soul would communicate themselves directly to her body, so that if you were holding her hand when she was troubled, you would feel it vibrant and trembling like a minnow freshly taken from the net.
p 50: It was the garden birds twittering in the clematis outside her window that made up my mother's last impression of earth life.
"The Yellow Iris"
p 61: If through the channels of our homely senses we learn to envisage with imagination the movement and murmurs of life in our moment of time, we become confederates with eternity. With so proud a purpose before us all extravagant anthropocentric hopes appear irrelevant, and we grow content to contemplate with philosophic detachment the flux of creation as it is presented to our eyes, nose, ears, moths, skins.
p 63: Until we are satisfied with the plain miracle of life, with the plain miracle of what is, and make no further clamor, we will remain restless, froward, dissatisfied. True religion consists in a simple worship of life without stipulations.
"Natural Happiness"
p 66: Man alone has been partial to discontent; the slugs even show complacence as, with silent secret perspicacity, they draw towards the undefended seedlings of their appetites.
p 67: The priest rises to bless us with pontifical fingers punctiliously arranged, and his large claim provokes no protest. We do not see him as a direct representative of sacerdotal Egypt, an obsolete witch-doctor out of the remote past, invoking the aid of beings that have never existed except in the bewildered dreams of savages.
pp 67-68: With bellies full of the blood and flesh of fellow animals we stand up to practice self-interested pieties, the claws on our fingers carefully disguised with gloves.
pp 72-73: To listen for a moment to the wind as it stirs the leaves of our garden trees, and to realize that this murmur was troubling earth vegetation before men were, and will be troubling it when they have gone, is to take knowledge of the breath of the infinite. It is a mystery, a sign for everyone, this movement of the planet's atmosphere. It dislodges the dust in the belfry where the owl stares and a loose board rattles. The nettles grouped by the farmyard wall sway to it, and in wide open spaces its music is not lost. No message comes through our senses but is full of worship - the taste of brown bread and red wine, the smell of a field of dazzling charlock, the sight of swallows sweeping back and forth over the tilted roof of a barn, the cool fair flesh of a young girl's body, the liquid song of a blackbird in the white twilight of the longest day.
p 73: We can do nothing better than to fling our bodies and souls before the god of life, passionately and without reserves, as oblations of golden wine are thrown from a cup.
"A Grave in Dorset"
p 83: Immediately before me there trod an aged laborer in a coat black as the feathered back of a cow. With a smell of dusty horse-dung rising from the road I looked at the neck of this old man, so deeply wrinkled with "noughts and crosses" wrinkles, and thought of his father and his father's father, who had all probably worn this same black braided garment on a hundred such occasions. Wherever a man lives there also is sorrow. I continued to follow the elmwood coffin almost hidden under its burden of bluebells, buttercups, pink campions, and branches of May blossoms.
"When the Unicorn 'Cons' the Waters"
p 100: We stand before the throne of life sullen and dull. So blunt is the apprehension of most of us that we are content to spend our priceless and peculiar hours in a state of anesthesia put upon us by a fatal herd hypnotism.
p 100: You are alive. Millions and millions of your kind who have lived upon earth are now dead. Millions and millions who will live upon the earth will be dead; and yet any old man dozing in the sun is at this instant relishing his dot of time out of eternity.
pp 100-101: We are every day betrayed by the blank stare of custom. The commonplace accessories of commonplace people weigh us down. We accept life on its surface value. The Jubilee clock, a newspaper fluttering against a beach chair, a banana skin half buried in the sand - to an enlightened mind even such objects of actuality can be compelled to render up their poetic essences. The Jubilee clock, so expert an example of its complacent period, is tracing out now, very now, upon its bland white face your own apportioned interval of gladness and sorrow. The tattered news-sheet, for all its depressing ordinary look, is composed of an adroit web of fibrous matter from the forest trees of the Labrador. The skin of this fruit was of this very shape and texture when Babylon was being built.
"A Locust Message"
pp 104-105: Life freely scattered in every direction over the earth's surface, life with no other covenant but to live! - the goldfinch schooled to pilfer the seeds of the thistle, the flea to explore the dorsal spines of the drowsy hedgehog!
pp 105-107: The alien intelligence of my fancy would be aware of the astronomical constitution of time, with its past, present, and future as one. In every city, in every hundred, in every village, he would see the procession of the generations; in deserts and on grazing grounds; by seashore and by forest glade, he would mark the ephemeral populations springing up like young corn, only a few years later to be rotting out of sight. He would see these violent and obstinate breeds, ignorant, prejudiced, self-obsessed, fretting away their moments, drinking, fornicating, grasping at possessions, and begetting children in wide marriage beds. He would see them hanging themselves, drowning themselves, cutting their throats. He would see them spending their years in obedient acquiescence, sowing seeds, weaving linen, harvesting, contriving tricks for rapidly traveling upon wheels, or manipulating the wavelength of the planet's atmosphere for the transference of sound, swift as light. He would see them in gala houses, content to watch pantomimes of their lives, with artificial lights slanting down upon hand-constructed stages, with acted commentaries upon their own existence scrupulously presented, puny, pitiful, passing. He would see them standing at the corners of streets, taking all for granted at the point of weariness, or seated at luxurious tables, picking out olives with fingernails pink and polished, or peeling off the outer foliage of artichoke flowers, their eyes covertly aware of each other's naked bodies artfully concealed.
Again he would see them very grave, inordinately grave, thronging into assemblies, arguing, demonstrating, full of confidence: self-righteous reformers, pompous and important, they themselves and their causes signifying nothing in fifty years. He would see them crowding into houses of prayer, partaking of barbarous rites with superstitious unction; and a fortnight later at the grave's side with tears streaming down from heads that will be bare skulls in no time at all. He would see them as lovers sharing with the hog, the stoat, and the midge the tremulous and mysterious thrill of creation, boys and girls wandering by the edges of rye-fields, wandering in copses sun-sheltered by hazel-nut foliage tender and thin, the green light through the horizontal leaf plates telling of the fairylands of their dreams. As men and women went to and fro, loving and hating, laboring and cheating, he would listen to their talk and hear them numbering the stars in the heavens, hear them cataloguing their philosophic speculations, hear them meditating upon certain legends and rumors of earth-interested gods.
"The Genius of Peter Breughel"
p 111: If we could live our lives again, with what eagerness and zest would we not eat great yellow custards, go to bed with our brides, and caper light of heel down the village street!
"Natural Worship"
pp 118-119: It is from this natural awe that we come to learn that in every breath a man breathes from the chrisom to the shroud there is a sacramental quality. And always it is through the senses, our rabble senses of delight, that this religious mood is quickened.
"A Butterfly Secret"
pp 126-127: There is only one way to take life, and this we may learn from any common-white butterfly flitting from flower-head to flower-head, from strawberry plant to strawberry plant, content with the sunshine of a summer's day. Yesterday as I rested on the side of a tumulus I witnessed the lovemaking of two lesser-blues, who were lodged on a long grass which itself was supported by the stalk of a knapweed. Their heads were turned in opposite directions, the one looking towards the sea, the other towards a great inland valley. Their curled trunks below their soft spotted ornamented wings were united, and one could not but marvel at the rare creative genius that could have devised so delicate an expression for these lovely insects to enjoy, on the end of a tasseled grass.
"An Ancient French House"
p 148: Near the door was the stoup for the holy water, now half full of owls' pellets.
"Gypsies"
p 194: Do gypsies appeal perhaps to something incorrigibly antinomian in all of our natures so that we find it unsettling to our acquired docilities to meet in a woodland glade a people who have never acknowledged social obligations, who have been consistently indifferent to ethical systems, who have won the freedom from convention that we secretly crave, and, who, more than any of us, may be said to belong to the great many-breasted earth-mother?
"Poxwell Stone Circle"
p 213: It would soon, as those interminable periods went by and the employments of hunting and berry-gathering were abandoned for the more stable occupations of domesticating animals, that human reliance on magic steadily gave place to forms of religious confidence.
"Dorset Cliff Foxes"
pp 227-228: Never do I hear the husky yelp of a fox without a feeling of exultation that these darlings of Dionysus, diminutive russet wolves of the fells and fields, are still abroad in England. What a sound it is on a frosty night ringing through a bare thorn hedge behind which one of these outlaws, with slender mandibles and sensitive black nostrils, is foraging amongst the tooth-scraped roots near a sheepfold on the chance of finding on the frozen ground of mud and flints a ewe's afterbirth.
"Easter in Dorset"
p 230: If a religious faith had been evolved with no other obligation than to satisfy the innocent longings of the human heart it could hardly have fallen upon a doctrine more reassuring than that the actual bodies of those we love should rise again from the lonely grave in glorified forms.
November 23, 2023
I was interested to read something by the brother of John Cowper Powys of whom I am a big admirer. The title also attracted me as an environmentalist.
The book is made up of a number of individual short pieces but the first two are much longer. They describe the background to Llewelyn's life, his struggles with his health and how he came to be living in Dorset.
It is a easy and accessible book to read and the language is often beautiful in describing scenes or landscapes. It is depressing that even in the 1930's Llewelyn was finding oiled seabirds. One account of such an encounter had me in tears.
The only negative I can mention is that at times single sentences are full of idioms, phrases and descriptors that tumble over each other with gay abandon because his passion is being caught on the page. It does make for some long sentences that I ended up re-reading to try and capture both the meaning and his fervor.
But overall I did enjoy this collection of essays.
The book is made up of a number of individual short pieces but the first two are much longer. They describe the background to Llewelyn's life, his struggles with his health and how he came to be living in Dorset.
It is a easy and accessible book to read and the language is often beautiful in describing scenes or landscapes. It is depressing that even in the 1930's Llewelyn was finding oiled seabirds. One account of such an encounter had me in tears.
The only negative I can mention is that at times single sentences are full of idioms, phrases and descriptors that tumble over each other with gay abandon because his passion is being caught on the page. It does make for some long sentences that I ended up re-reading to try and capture both the meaning and his fervor.
But overall I did enjoy this collection of essays.
March 31, 2025
I thought the author was someone I'd really like to be around in real life. The struggle with this book is there were some chapters that were insightful, relatable, and I found myself rereading. But there were some others that were a bit more painful to get through. I still highly recommend this book, but don't treat it as a whole book, read and if it's not getting your attention, move on to the next
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews