‘Spring came by water to Broadoak this year…’

A century since the Spring that inspired Frederick William Harvey (1888–1957) to write these lines:

Spring came by water to Broadoak this year.
I saw her clear.
Though on the earth a sprinkling
Of snowdrops shone, the unwrinkling
Bright curve of Severn River
Was of her gospel first giver.
Like a colt new put to pasture it galloped on;
And a million
Small things on its back for token
Of her coming it bore. 

[…]  If
Spring dreamed
Lazily in Earth’s half-frozen blood,
On Severn’s flood
Her presence bravely gleamed.
Yea, all who sought her
Might see, wondering, how Spring walked the water.

The full poem can be read on the website of Gloucestershire Archives here.

The hamlet of Broadoak, Glos., glimpsed from a Cardiff-bound train in June 2017.  In the distance, the A48 road converges with the bank of the Severn estuary.

Harvey was a very interesting figure.  In adolescence he was very close friends with the composer Herbert Howells (1892–1983) and the poet-composer Ivor Gurney (1890–1937); all three were deeply influenced in their lives and works by the landscape of their native Gloucestershire, the Cotswold hills and the river Severn in particular, yet Harvey was the only one of the three to make a permanent home in county.  He was also a Catholic convert, an adherent of the Distributist cause (an attempt, championed by by Chesterton and Belloc, to translate the teachings of the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum into an economic theory) and a solicitor whose sense of charity led him so often to practise pro bono that he eventually had to sell off his business.  I have written more about Harvey, Howells and Gurney here.

The Benedictus from the Missa Sabrinensis (‘Mass of the Severn’, 1954) of Herbert Howells, a great friend of Harvey’s in their youth.