Much.

AMOR LOCI

I could draw its map by heart,

showing its contours,

strata and vegetation,

name every height,

small burn and lonely sheiling,

but nameless to me,

faceless as heather or grouse,

are those who live there,

its dead too vague for judgement,

tangible only

what they wrought, their giant works

of delve and drainage

in days preterite: long since

their hammering stopped

as the lodes all petered out

in the Jew Limestone.

Here and there a tough chimney

still towers over

dejected masonry, moss,

decomposed machines,

with no one about, no chance

of buttering bread,

a land postured in my time

for marginal farms.

Any musical future

is most unlikely.

Industry wants Cheap Power,

romantic muscle

a perilous wilderness,

Mr Pleasure pays

for surf-riding, claret, sex:

it offers them none.

To me, though, much: a vision,

not (as perhaps at

twelve I thought it) of Eden,

still less of a New

Jerusalem but, for one,

convinced he will die,

more comely, more credible

than either day-dream.

How but with some real focus

of desolation

could I, by analogy,

imagine a Love

that, however often smeared,

shrugged at, abandoned

by a frivolous worldling,
does not abandon?

W.H. Auden