In a little less than two hour’s drive from here

I could be motoring through A.E. Housman’s

‘land of lost content’. Softly playing

on the radio is George Butterworth’s

A minor Rhapsody A Shropshire Lad,

its pianissimo opening chords

evoking Housman’s ‘blue remembered hills’.

From his boyhood home near Bromsgrove,

the poet could see the summit of Brown Clee Hill –

above the smoke of Kidderminster

that lies in-between. The opening line

of the first poem in A Shropshire Lad

begins ‘From Clee to heaven the beacon burns’.

I am not sure whether it is harmonies

like Butterworth’s and Ralph Vaughan Williams’,

and cadences like those of Housman and

Edward Thomas, that conjure for me,

immediately and movingly,

a prelapsarian England in which

my ancestors had no part, a country

that exists as if the Western Front’s

criminality – which murdered both

Butterworth and Thomas – had never been,

or whether what summons such nostalgia

is merely that sense of loss I feel about

my own life’s absences.