Featured Poem: ‘Mist in the Meadows’ by John Clare

This week's poem has been chosen by Katie Clark, a Get Into Reading project worker, who read it with residents at a local care home for people suffering from dementia. They particularly enjoyed Clare's evocative descriptions: how the mist "reaks and curdles up / Like fallen clouds", and that wonderful "rawky creeping smoke"!

We hope you like it too, as we approach the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...

Mist in the Meadows

The evening oer the meadow seems to stoop
More distant lessens the diminished spire
Mist in the hollows reaks and curdles up
Like fallen clouds that spread – and things retire
Less seen and less – the shepherd passes near
And little distant most grotesquely shades
As walking without legs – lost to his knees
As through the rawky creeping smoke he wades
Now half way up the arches disappear
And small the bits of sky that glimmer through
Then trees loose all but tops – I meet the fields
And now indistinctness passes bye
The shepherd all his length is seen again
And further on the village meets the eye

John Clare (1793 - 1864)