In Wholesome Days

 Henry Bright's A Highland Croft

Per Scriptum E. Wesley Reynolds
Soli Deo Gloria

Post-modern historiography fails to see the old wholesomeness of man's casual dealings of which the world once was full and of which so many homely poets have watched so acutely: the merry olde England or the folk America. I have written this poem after the fashion of Longfellow's Wayside Inn, and in agreement with Washington Irving's observations from his Sketchbook:

There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times. They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavour of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more home-bred, social, and joyous than at present. I regret to say that they are daily growing more and more faint, being gradually worn away by time, but still more obliterated by modern fashion... The world has become more worldly. There is more of dissipation, and less of enjoyment. Pleasure has expanded into a broader, but a shallower stream, and has forsaken many of those deep and quiet channels where it flowed sweetly through the calm bosom of domestic life. Society has acquired a more enlightened and elegant tone; but it has lost many of its strong local peculiarities, its homebred feelings, its honest fireside delights.

I wish for again those honest fireside delights, and as a historian, I desire to keep a sharp eye out for them! Some other influences were John Greenleaf Whittier's Barefoot Boy (one of my grandmother's favorite poems), and Thomas Kinkade's paintings. Probably, Ralph Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending is musically closest to this theme.

In Wholesome Days

For all those wholesome days again,
Where no two houses seemed the same,
But each with brick or latticed pane
And gas and oil gave homely flame.
A cheery hearth or mantle clock
Lived there to greet the welcomed friend;
A father's hand to lift the lock
When guest did choose that way to wend.

Oh all those wholesome days of yore!
When gentlemen of tastes refined,
Their shirts in trousers, and waistcoats wore
Beneath their frocks with pleats alined.
Who doffed their hats of tall felt fir,
To ladies who were passing by.
More punctual than proud they were,
And walked with canes and wore a tie.

The hearty men of lesser sort,
Plastered not with sayings trite
Their shirts, or cut them far too short,
But lived in stricter way of might.
Both rich or poor did ask when hot,
To roll their sleeves to freer height;
Inquiring first if coats they brought
May be cast off in ladies' sight.

In all those honest tales of old,
Men measured summer trips in strides,
And in the dreary winter's cold,
Numbered distance in swift sleigh rides.
Up garden fences white unfurled,
The hollyhock or tender rose
And waked to greet a quiet world;
Or so the best old story goes.

The farmer boys who tended sheep
Yes, all those good old barefoot boys,
For afternoon's repose of sleep,
Took to the haystack with their toys,
And dreamed of sun and rushing flood,
Or lowing of the cows below
And secrets from the field and wood,
While milk maids twist a flowery bow.

In kindly books one often meets
In some cottage upon a time,
Or city home with lamp-lit streets
A tireless work and rest sublime.
And on that regular special day,
The Lord's own day, all walked the lanes
To church a mile or two away
And healed their hearts from toiling pains.

The country inns were always full,
And yet no house stood all alone.
This Longfellow tells with all his soul;
What Irving wrote, Kinkade has shone.
In all those wholesome days of men,
Where joys and vigor seemed so rife
The world was never hurried then,
And yet seemed still to brim with life.