A world seems to end at the top of this hill.
Across it, clouds and thistle-clocks fly,
And ragged hedges are running down from the sky,
As though the wild had begun to spill
Over a rampart soon to be drowned
With all it guards of domesticated ground.
It was silent here on the slope of the hill.
But now, now, as if the wild grass
And the wild sky had found their voices at last
And they were one voice, there comes a shrill
Delirious mewing, thin as air,
A wraith-like rumour, nowhere and everywhere.
Over the hill three buzzards are wheeling
On the glass sky their skaters’ curves.
Each in its solemn figures-of-nought preserves
Some thread invisible, reeling, unreeling,
Then glides to a stop and with wings outlined
Motionless broods there balancing on the wind.
Often enough ere now I have eyed them –
Those three celestial bodies appear
Cutting their abstract figures year after year –
But never have fathomed what instinct rides them
Round heaven’s dome like a frozen pond,
Nor why they are always three, and what is the bond
Between them: although you might well surmise
They are earth-souls doomed in their gyres to unwind
Some tragic love-tangle wherein they had mortally pined,
When you hear those phantom, famishing cries.
But birds are birds. No human key
Of fond frustration unites the haunting three.
Wild natures, kin to all cageless things –
Thistledown, grass and cloud – yet mewing
So ghostly, no prey nor animal need pursuing
In those pure rings and hoverings,
I watch the angelic pastime until
I seem to know what is beyond the hill.