To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

I'm reading H.V. Morton's In Search of England*, and was struck by this apparently-untitled poem he wrote as an epigraph. I've heard rumors about this month being some kind of poetry-posting month, so here it is:

You will remember, lady, how the morn
Came slow above the Isle of Athelney,
And all the flat lands lying to the sky
Were shrouded sea-like in a veil of grey,
As standing on a little rounded hill,
We placed our hands upon the Holy Thorn.

Do you remember in what hopeful fear
We gazed behind us, thinking we might see
Arthur come striding through the high, bright corn,
Or Alfred resting on a Saxon spear?
And as the cold mists melted from the fields
We seemed to hear the winding of a horn.

You will remember how we walked the Vale,
Through Meare and Westhay unto Godney End;
And how we said: "Time is an endless lane
And life a little mile without a bend...
Behind us what? Before us, if we ran,
Might we not be in time to see the Grail?"


Very Tennysonesque, to be sure, but with less bombast and overwrought epicness, which is good.


* Rather patronizing to lots of people in several places, but quite good otherwise. I found this little bit unutterably melancholy: "'[The battleship's] not being built against time for anything,' I asked suspiciously, 'for the Great War was the war that ended wars, wasn't it?'" Keep in mind that this was published in 1927.

Ow.