In a Forgotten Field In England

He had no insight into the mysteries Of the gilded sports Of the British social elite, By the time he arrived at his beloved college, Long, long ago in a long-forgotten England, And in later years he came to the opinion That if he possessed a single quality That might be termed noble He owed it in part to his education, And not least the four years he spent there, And there’d be times when certain pieces Of quintessentially English pastoral music Still had the power to evoke his strange and sudden vanishing, While seeming to him to bespeak a passion For the Arcadian soul of England that verged on the ecstatic, And others when he’d dream of a day He might return to the scene of his flight as if in atonement, And commune with the soul of his beloved England, With a passion verging on the ecstatic, And then put the memory to rest for all time, And he absconded once...just the once it was... To avoid being chastised for something foolish he did, And he finished up wandering, forlornly wandering, His boots freshly caked with the purest English soil, Long, long ago in a forgotten field in England.