only after harvest do swifts head off
from this orange and gray sedimented
village where they pitch and squeal aloft
its long street gabled or pedimented
and these martlets these parasite-ridden
birds must be the unclean paracletes
of solar joy as they are bidden
to prepare their young for the repeat
journey south - ensuring the teaselled lanes
and poignant spire are well recorded;
for us Rochester and Wharton are names
to scream at the pink wheat and calm borders
their locus uberrimus no heaven
but their skimming of it our leaven
The Bear
Oxford
14 July 2018
Another poem about John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) and his niece Anne Wharton (1659-1685), both poets and intense sufferers from syphilis. Adderbury was their residence and the place of their deaths, for their seat was Adderbury House.
I visited Adderbury on 11 July 2018, having visited it first on 17 July 2017. It is a favourite place of mine - my English counterpart to Cordes-sur-Ciel.
The locus amoenus, the locus uberrimus are ideal places discussed in Thomas G. Rosenmeyer’s ” The Green Cabinet :- Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric” ( University of California Press 1969). The locus uberrimus is a place of such abundance and beauty, it is perhaps too much.