In this ballad by Walter De La Mare, a little boy is telling us how an Angel passed close to him and his friend as they played in the fields. Tom is so very excited and his childlike expressions add to his profundity, innocence and trepidation of the experience. I love how his experience of the meeting is so vivid, tactile and credible.
What could be simpler?
No one was in the fields
But me and Polly Flint,
When, like a giant across the grass,
The flaming angel went.
It was budding time in May,
And green as green could be,
And all in his height he went along
Past Polly Flint and me.
We’d been playing in the woods,
And Polly up, and ran
And hid her face, and said,
“Tom! Tom! The Man! The Man!”
And I up-turned; and there,
Like flames across the sky,
With wings all bristling, came
The angel striding by.
And a chaffinch overhead
Kept whistling in the tree
While the angel, blue as fire, came on
Past Polly Flint and me.
And I saw his hair, and all
The ruffling of his hem,
As over the clovers his bare feet
Trod without stirring them.
Polly-she cried; and, oh!
We ran, until the lane
Turned by the miller’s roaring wheel,
And we were safe again.
What could be simpler?
No one was in the fields
But me and Polly Flint,
When, like a giant across the grass,
The flaming angel went.
It was budding time in May,
And green as green could be,
And all in his height he went along
Past Polly Flint and me.
We’d been playing in the woods,
And Polly up, and ran
And hid her face, and said,
“Tom! Tom! The Man! The Man!”
And I up-turned; and there,
Like flames across the sky,
With wings all bristling, came
The angel striding by.
And a chaffinch overhead
Kept whistling in the tree
While the angel, blue as fire, came on
Past Polly Flint and me.
And I saw his hair, and all
The ruffling of his hem,
As over the clovers his bare feet
Trod without stirring them.
Polly-she cried; and, oh!
We ran, until the lane
Turned by the miller’s roaring wheel,
And we were safe again.
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