Personal Choice Volume 2 No.30

All Day It Has Rained

All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors

      Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,

      Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground

      And from the first grey wakening we have found

      No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain

      And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap

      And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.

      All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,

      Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream

      Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly

      Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly

      Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.

      And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,

      Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,

      Reading the Sunday papers - I saw a fox

      And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; -

      And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,

      And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities

      Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;

      As of ourselves or those whom we

      For years have loved, and will again

      Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain

      Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.

      And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart

      Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday

      Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard's merry play,

      Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me

      By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree

      To the Shoulder o' Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long

      On death and beauty - till a bullet stopped his song.

Alun Lewis

 Alun Lewis (1 July 1915 – 5 March 1944) was a Welsh poet. He is one of the best-known English-language war poets of the Second World War. His poetry centres around a "recurring obsession with the themes of isolation and death."