He had no insight into the mysteries
Of the gilded sports
Of the British social elite,
By the time he arrived at his beloved college,
Long, long ago in a long-forgotten England,
And in later years, when he looked back at his beloved college,
He'd insist if he possessed a single quality
That might be termed noble
He owed it to his education,
And not least the four years he spent there,
And there’d be times when certain pieces
Of quintessentially English pastoral music
Still had the power to evoke his strange and sudden flight,
While seeming to him to bespeak a passion
For the Arcadian soul of England that verged on the ecstatic,
And others when he’d dream of a day
He might return to the scene of his flight as if in atonement,
And commune with the soul of his beloved England,
With a passion verging on the ecstatic,
And then put the memory to rest for all time,
For he absconded once...just the once it was...
To avoid being chastised for something foolish he did,
And he finished up wandering, forlornly wandering,
His boots freshly caked with the purest English soil,
Long, long ago in a forgotten field in England.
'In a Forgotten Field in England' was distilled in late 2016 from an autobiographical piece entitled 'Leitmotifs from an English Pastorale', dating from several years earlier, and which will ultimately undergo a process of systematic marginalization, as I no longer identify with it to any degree.
