1.
Sweet Blaisdon, loveliest village of the name,
by chance I come back here to live again.
There smiling Spring its earliest visit paid,
while Summer Autumn’s blooms delayed.
Dear lovely haven of innocence and ease,
joy of my youth, where every face did please.
In bygone times I wandered Velde House Lane,
stood by its gates to watch the passing train.
Oft, have I sensed and seen thy every charm:
strolled Nottswood height, gazed on Stud Farm,
loitered by Longhope Brook, aside the water Mill,
heard St. Michael’s bells peal over Cinder’s Hill.
Now in my Winter years The White Hart bench
awaits where often I was wont my thirst to quench.
In mind, above plum tree blossom watching over all,
I clearly see the stately tower of noble Blaisdon Hall.
2.
Remembrance is music whose sweet refrain
echoes as I flee the spheres of peopled pain.
In all my wanderings round this world of care,
in all my griefs, of which I’ve had my share,
I still have hopes, my final years to crown,
here in Blaisdon before I lay me down;
to trim life’s guttering candle to its close,
to fan a gem-like flame from dying. In repose.
I still have hopes, dear Muse attend me still,
to show the curious my life-learned skill,
in open forum a growing group to draw,
to tell in poems of all I felt, and all I saw.
For, as a fox whom hound and horse pursue,
flees to the place from whence at first it flew,
I still fond hopes hold, my long travails past,
here to return, recline, to die at home at last.
O blest retirement, friend to life's decline,
I find at last all I never thought was mine.
How happy man who crowns, in years like these
a toiling youth of labour with such an age of ease.
Tobias - after Oliver Goldsmith.
Aged 80 I return to a village in Gloucestershire, UK where I worked 60 years ago as a teenage farm labourer. In this poem I use Oliver Goldsmith's poem - The Deserted Village - as a template.