Within a rocking garish tram
That sways along the dry highway
Where March dust blows:
He sits with one or two other elderly people -
Grey, shut in with their own thoughts despite the spring weather -
He and they in one tram crowded else with young life:
With schoolboys and schoolgirls, going home:
Fresh faced, slender wristed, ardent with life, unconscious of Life:
Untroubled even as yet by sex -
He looks out at the flowing level fields,
And feels the Spring sharp as a knife:
A dagger in his heart, An ague in his bones.
He feels his years; he is looking back;
Back from his own little closed-in house of age;
Grown over by the slow spreading of his own experience,
Whose tendrils wreathe the windows of his mind, framing his view.
Backward he peers; feeling how wistful is the trusting Spring;
Hating to see the weed uprooted by the plough;
Hating to know the ploughman, in his turn ploughed down;
Knowing that Hope, like seed, has been flung wide on all these little fields
And many a crop been lost.
And yet here are the children laughing, And the sun shining,
And the little fields ripening to a tilth, And he and one or two elderly people
Knowing how difficult life is:
No simple splendid thing.
He thinks of the parable of the sower,
Of the seed on fruitful ground,
And is troubled by the mystery of free will;
More harrowing than any ordered destiny:
For some of those years he looks back upon Were surely his-
He has known other Springs than this,
And Autumns which have brought no harvest home.
And to him this little cargo of children,
This little collection of youth, from out all youth,
Becomes symbolic of Youth.
And this Spring, out of all Springs, past and to come,
Symbolic of Spring.
And parallel emotions reach out and converge;
The care-free children become one with the Spring,
And the Spring and the fields as children untaught of Time ...
His thought is away on the permanence of Life, and theshortness of a life:
On things too sad to be thought of:
And too beautiful to be forgot:
Till his emotions coalesce in one tiny quivering sphere,
And a tear trembles in his eye.
NOTE: It is uncertain where the tram in question operated, although, given Ashley's almost exclusive association with Nottinghamshire, Nottingham is a strong candidate. Trams ran in Nottingham from 1878 and were electrified in 1901.