I have lived in a single landscape. Every tone
And turn have had for their ground
These beginnings in grey-black: a land
Too handled to be primary – all the same,
The first in feeling. I thought it once
Too desolate, diminished and too tame
To be the foundation for anything. It straggles
A haggard valley and lets through
Discouraged greennesses, lights from a pond or two.
By ash-tips, or where the streets give out
In cindery in-betweens, the hills
Swell up and free of it to where, behind
The whole vapoury, patched battlefield,
The cows stand steaming in an acrid wind.
This place, the first to seize on my heart and eye,
Has been their hornbook and their history.