From "Huntingdonshire Nocturnes".(Poem)

 
FROM "HUNTINGDONSHIRE NOCTURNES" 
 
   Summer nights, they used to sleep out in the field, 
   these cottages get so hot: slate roof, no space 
   between ceiling and timbers: homes for a row of mere 
 
   husbandmen. To lie out looking up at the Plough, 
   at a night blazing cornflower and poppy, before electricity 
   sowed the village in its herbicidal shroud of light. 
 
   Even now, when--in our shire or the next--there's lightning 
   and the dark snaps in, you are at once unwrapped to something 
   those who hop on their packages to the sun forget is here 
 
   under our feet. It earths. Like the fires that burned in the fields-- 
   hateful to wildlife, but you felt the country was alive. As vile 
   as the fox-hunt, and as stirring, watching those red flames 
 
   hack through a crop, scorch a tree, sear hedges ... 
   A far ...