Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ANAMNESIS AND NOSTALGIA; TO LIONEL JOHNSON, by VICTOR GUSTAVE PLARR


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ANAMNESIS AND NOSTALGIA; TO LIONEL JOHNSON, by             Poem Explanation         Poet's Biography
First Line: The traveller in a burning clime
Last Line: And something of a mortal pang.
Subject(s): Country Life; England; Johnson, Lionel (1867-1902); Longing; Nature; Nostalgia; English


The traveller in a burning clime
Longs for the temperate English skies,
And will be talking of the time
When he shall see her cliffs arise
Above the gray sea swaying broadly
Past Dover and the Cliff of Lear.

But I, when others boast of home
And of the Strand's o'er-peopled way,
Preferring London before Rome,
And Thames to Arno any day,
Turn, and again do hear in fancy
A thin stream among heathery scarps

Among the fern and heather brown,
Past some menhir unrifled still,
The Ellé I hear go tinkling down
'Neath quaint Sainte Barbe upon her hill,
Where all the mountain air is quickened
By wild memorial perfume.

I am no Celt, and yet the thought
Of pine, and rock, and heathy height,
And pools where the huge never-caught
Mysterious trout, half out of sight,
Swim slowly by or flash a glimmer
Of sides with old signs scriptured o'er,

And of the strain'd unending song
Of rushing water in oak-woods,
Will catch me, when I walk along
Amid the town's prosaic moods,
And with a strange nostalgia move me,
And something of a mortal pang.





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