“But if you want the spirit of it,” he said, “listen to this. It’s by a man called Swinburne, of whom you have probably never heard. Shut your books.”
I can see him now: it was a chilly day in spring and he put his feet up on the side of the stove that warmed the classroom. He had closed his book too, and his blue merry eyes grew grave as he began:
“When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, The mother of months in meadow and plain Fills the hollows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain, And the bright brown nightingale, amorous, Is half assuaged for Itylus, For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces, The tongueless vigil and all the pain.”
Beesly held the thirty boys under the spell of that magic: we were all quite ordinary youngsters of fifteen and sixteen, and lo, we were a harp in his hand and he thrummed us into melody. There was stir and trampling of feet outside, for the hour of school was over, and I remember well that he waited at the end of one stanza, and said, “Shall I finish it or would you like to go? Any boy who likes may go.”
Nobody got up (it was not from fear of his disapproval), and he went on:
“For winter’s rains and ruins are over, And all the season of snows and sins, The day that severs lover from lover, The light that loses, the night that wins. And Time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and cover Blossom by blossom the spring begins.”
He came to the end of the chorus and got up.
“You can all be ten minutes late next school,” he said, “because I have kept you.”