Collected English Verse — Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. b. 1840, d. 1922 (Part 3 of 3)
I know my quarries every one,
The meuse where she sits low;
The road she chose to-day
was run
A hundred years ago.
The lags, the gills, the forest ways,
The hedgerows one and all,
These are the kingdoms of
my chase,
And bounded by my wall;
Nor has the world a better thing,
Though one should search it round,
Than thus to live one’s
own sole king,
Upon one’s own sole ground.
I like the hunting of the hare;
It brings me, day by day,
The memory of old days as fair,
With
dead men past away.
To these, as homeward still I ply
And pass the churchyard gate
Where all are laid as I must
lie,
I stop and raise my hat.
I like the humting of the hare;
New sports I hold in scorn.
I like to be as my fathers were,
In
the days e’er I was born.