14 FEBRUARY 1941, Page 12

IN THE VILLAGE : BROADTOWN NOVEMBER, 1940

I LOOK at the conifers, the grey row of leeks, The buddleia now naked and the Michaelmas daisies: I can feel with its pom-poms the gentle cloth On the table inside: and the tall dog, gone white At the mouth, waves his tail and goes lazily Between the sweet-shop and chapel. How usual, Usual it seems: and yet what intricate Mean passions bend the daisies and finger The green pom-poms and how the smell of fear, Like a rotted nose, flavours the scene; and fluttering From the honey the Red Admirals of the buddleia Are dead. 0 Love

Help me if I see now such sweet Trivial things loose in the great filthy Senseless cave of the human mind, where like a bat Ignorance stinks over the sucked bones

And other debris of men, and the blind fish

Move in the stream that moves to nowhere coldly from

Nowhere and the white spider incuriously Hangs in the far corner. GEOFFREY GRIGSON.