Innocence

All twenty lines of the poem, Innocence:

 

They laughed at one I loved –

The triangular hill that hung

Under the Big Forth.  They said

That I was bounded by the whitehorn hedges

Of the little farm and did not know the world.

But I knew that love’s doorway to life

Is the same doorway everywhere.

 

Ashamed of what I loved

I flung her from me and called her a ditch

Although she was smiling at me with violets.

 

But now I am back in her briary arms;

The dew of an Indian summer morning lies

On beached potato-stalks – 

What age am I?

 

I do not know what age I am,

I am no mortal age;

I know nothing of women,

Nothing of cities,

I cannot die

Unless I walk outside these whitehorn hedges.