By the Ninth Green, St. Enodoc

Dark of primaeval pine encircles me

With distant thunder of an angry sea

While wrack and resin scent alternately

      The air I breathe.

On slate compounded before man was made

The ocean ramparts roll their light and shade

Up to Bray Hill and, leaping to invade,

      Fall back and seethe.

A million years of unrelenting tide

Have smoothed the strata of the steep cliffside:

How long ago did rock with rock collide

      To shape these hills?

One day the mayfly’s life, three weeks the cleg’s,

The woodworm’s four-year cycle bursts its eggs,

The flattened centipede lets loose its legs

      And stings and kills.

Hot life pulsating in this foreshore dry,

Damp life upshooting from the reed-beds high,

Under those barrows, dark against the sky,

      The Iron Age dead—

Why is it that a sunlit second sticks?

What force collects all this and seeks to fix

This fourth March morning nineteen sixty-six

      Deep in my head?