The Life of John Heritage

Born in the Cotswolds in eighteen-forty or so,Bred on a hill-top that seemed the most of the worldUntil he travelled the valleys, and found what a wonderOf leagues from Gloucester lay to Stroud or Ciceter,John Heritage was a tiler. He split the stone,After the frosts, and learnt the laying of tiles,And was famous about the shire. And he was friendlyWith Cotswold nature, hearing the hidden rooksIn Golden Vale, and the thin bleat of goats,And the rattling harness of Trilly’s teams at plough,And Richard Parker’s scythe for many years,As he went upon his tiling; and the great landmarks,As loops of the Severn seen from Bisley Hill,Were his familiars, something of his religion.

And he prospered, as men do. His little wageYet left a little over his wedded needs,And here a cottage he bought, and there another,About the Cotswolds, built of the royallest stoneThat’s quarried in England, until he could think of ageWith an easy mind; and an acre of land was hisWhere at hay-harvest he worked a little from tiling,Making his rick maturely or damning the windThat scattered the swathes beyond his fork’s controlling.And he trotted ajog to the town on market Thursdays,Driving a stout succession of good black geldings,That cropped his acre some twenty years apiece.And he was an honest neighbour; and so he grew old,And five strong sons, grizzled and middle-aged,Carried him down the hill, and on a stoneThe mason cut--“John Heritage, who died,Fearing the Lord, at the age of seventy-six.”

And I know that some of us shatter our hearts on earth,With mightier aims than ever John Heritage knew,And think such things as never the tiler thought,Because of our pride and our eagerness of mind ...But a life complete is a great nobility,And there’s a wisdom biding in Cotswold stone,While we in our furious intellectual travelFall in with strange foot-fellows on the road.