Poetry Friday: Remembering Eiluned Lewis

We Who Were Born
by Eiluned Lewis (1900-1979)

We who were born
In country places
Far from cities
And shifting faces,
We have a birthright
No man can sell,
And a secret joy
No man can tell.

For we are kindred
To lordly things:

The wild duck's flight
And the white owl's wings,
The pike and the salmon,
The bull and the horse,
The curlew's cry
And the smell of gorse.

Pride of trees,
Swiftness of streams,
Magic of frost
Have shaped our dreams.
No baser vision
Their spirit fills
Who walk by right
On the naked hills.


Another treat from Favorite Poems Old and New, selected by Helen Ferris and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard.

Eiluned Lewis was a Welsh poet, novelist, and longtime correspondent to Country Life magazine, where she contributed the "Countrywoman's Notes" column. In her lifetime she was likened to Jane Austen, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Kenneth Grahame, and Arthur Ransome. Miss Lewis's sister Medina once observed, "Eiluned's childhood days cast a spell on her from which she never really awoke."

Her work Dew on the Grass, which originally came out in 1934, is scheduled to be republished later this fall, at least in the UK and Canada.

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Kelly at Big A little a has the day's round-up along with a poem, "A Little Bird" by A.S. Pushkin. Thanks, Kelly!