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As I stopped beside this fallow field overgrown with buttercups, I was reminded of one of my favourite poems. I could still remember most of it from my schooldays and quietly recited it to myself. This might be Scotland, but the poem, I think, is still wonderful:

"Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!

"And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge—
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!"

So wrote the English poet, Robert Browning, when he was living in Florence with his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They had moved to Italy in 1846 shortly after their marriage on account of her ill health but he was constantly homesick and wished to return to his beloved England, which he ultimately did after his wife's death in 1861.

Shot in RAW and converted and edited in PSE9.