Explore "Rocky Acres" by Robert Graves on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
This is a wild land, country of my choice,
With harsh craggy mountain, moor ample and bare.
Seldom in these acres is heard any voice / But voice of cold water that runs here and there / Through rocks and lank heather growing without care. / No mice in the heath run nor no birds cry / For fear of the dark speck that floats in the sky.
He soars and he hovers rocking on his wings, / He scans his wide parish with a sharp eye, / He catches the trembling of small hidden things, / He tears them in pieces, dropping from the sky: / Tenderness and pity the land will deny, / Where life is but nourished from water and rock / A hardy adventure, full of fear and shock.
Time has never journeyed to this lost land, / Crakeberries and heather bloom out of date, / The rocks jut, the streams flow singing on either hand, / Careless if the season be early or late. / The skies wander overhead, now blue, now slate: / Winter would be known by his cold cutting snow / If June did not borrow his armour also.
Yet this is my country be loved by me best, / The first land that rose from Chaos and the Flood, / Nursing no fat valleys for comfort and rest, / Trampled by no hard hooves, stained with no blood. / Bold immortal country whose hill tops have stood / Strongholds for the proud gods when on earth they go, / Terror for fat burghers in far plains below.