“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.”

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

   Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

   Steady thy laden head across a brook;

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats, widely considered one of the greatest poets of the English language, received the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature. His work was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

I was meaning to write about Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë for a very long time. However, work and other unnecessary and inconsequential matters tended to overshadow my earnest wish to do so. Although I have already read novels written by her more well known sisters such as Emily and Charlotte, Anne Brontë stands apart from the rest due to the simplicity of her emotions. Agnes Grey is filled with the importance of being good and the need for living a life more earthly and fulfilling than getting entrapped by the outwardly gaudy life of contemporary Victorian England. Agnes Grey, the protagonist is more happy within the secluded surroundings of the simple pastoral life that her family tends to celebrate than within the four walls of the Victorian bourgeois life where she has to earn her living as a governess. Indeed her adventures or misadventures (in most cases) during her tenure with two different families as a governess is what the main plot of the novel is about.

Having said that, the reader simply cannot ignore Edward Weston the hero of the novel whom the novelist presents in more a cordial light than Heathcliffe of “Wuthering Heights” or Mr. Rochester of “Jane Eyre”. Weston is the solid clergyman who happens to be around Agnes whenever she needs him and provides her with his shoulder whenever she encounters some misfortune. Edward Weston is in fact one of the most reliable male characters ever created in fiction. The only other person who may rival him in matters of reliance is Sydney Carton from “A Tale of Two Cities”.

The beauty of the novel however lies in its language and the values of simplicity and homeliness that the authoress wishes to make her readers acquainted with. Pastoral and church life is elevated as being far above the ostentation of modern city life. Further, the novelist also articulates elaborately upon the dark underbelly of Victorian alliances comprised through marriages based on money and wealth. In comparison to the marriage alliances forged by her wards, Agnes succeeds in the end in marrying the man she loves simply for domestic harmony and nothing else to overshadow the union.

I would recommend Agnes Grey to all primarily for its immaculate language, old world emotions and a general feeling of peace that the novel tends to shower upon its readers. The novel is short and succinct, and yet it carries within its folds a wonderful feeling of tranquility and bonhomie that one can associate with a world long gone and long obliterated from the present world known to the modern man or reader. A world unknown and lost within the sands of time. A world that had existed long before old pastoral England became industrialized. A world of simple village folks untouched by the complexities of modernism.

So much for now. Au revoir !