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The pelican is vulning her breast. The painter has shown a delicate spray of blood springing forth towards the chick, who looks pleased, even mildly excited, though unsurprised. She obviously deems maternal vulning no more than her due, a very proper recognition of needs and duties.
Neither bird looks much like a pelican, being of slim build, freckle-feathered and pointy-beaked. "Possibly Chinese influence", we learn, and reserve judgement on the freckliness and daintiness of Chinese pelicans. It is, anyway, a charming picture, the elegant mother with loopingneck and stabbing beak, the chick cheerfully hopping with half-raised wings to receive her feast. What, after all, she may be anthropomorphically thinking, is a mother for?
The bank and ditch are all whiteness, frondiness, still abundant, exuberant, diverse. What would she feel? — an old woman, one day, reaching for her out-of-date flower-book, seeing little then in meagre hedge-rows to match the pictures? She might mutter a litany, "Hedge-parsley, wild carrot, chervil", remembering delicate distinctions. She'd become a friend to ground-elder, even, that elegant pest.
Through the gate there's a glitter and sombreness of water — an old village reservoir, twin lakes, tree-shaded; broken bridge; miniature dam. Beyond, a field-path, untrodden, loses itself on the way to the hills. A pair of swans and five cygnets idle over the lake to look at the stranger, and see me no threat.
One day at the water's edge an old woman may remember how whiteness shone up from a perfect reflection; how the cob snaked his sleek neck down to the pen and touched her once with his beak. Silent lake, lifeless, lacking for years those white presences; on the shore an old woman, remembering swans.
Far away, we saw three chimneys in the trees Across the valley, on a little hill Beyond the first hill's shoulder.
Shading our eyes from the sidelong evening sun, We gazed and guessed till we could almost see The roofs of beast-house, stable and barn.
No smoke rose from the chimneys, we said at first, But soon we swore there was smoke, so alive the house Seemed in the dying sunlight.
And afterwards, alone, I searched on maps To make the house more mine by knowing its name — And found there is no farm on the hill,
No house of any kind, not even a ruin. What trick of sun and shade put chimneys there For us to find and talk about?
And is the evening more real than the house? Now both are gone, it seems a fine distinction That one was and the other was not.
Remembering, I build the evening again, The plunging valley and the little hill, And look! there are chimneys in the trees.
I remember piprake ice on rocks by a climbing road, needling, stabbing the air; and the hurt air savagely seeking a victim, burning my lungs with cold. The valley seemed helpless in an agony of white; my eyes dazzled and ached, ears felt a mute throbbing of pain. Yet now in this winter's threatening warmth, still called ‘unseasonable’, I could wish back even gelid extremes, even pitiless breath of unassailable ice at an unchanging pole.
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