MARCH

THE north-cast wind has come from Norroway,
Roaring he came above the white waves' tips!
The foam of the loud sea was on his lips,
And all his hair was salt with falling spray.
Over the keen light of northern day
He cast his snow cloud's terrible eclipse;
Beyond our banks he suddenly struck the ships,
And left them labouring on his landward way.

The certain course that to my strength belongs
Drives him with gathering purpose and control
Until across Vendean flats he sees
Ocean, the eldest of his enemies.
Then wheels he for him, glorying in goal
And gives him challenge, bellowing battle songs.

~Hilaire Belloc

Sailing Vessels in a Strong Wind, by Hendrick Maertensz Sorgh.
Oil on canvas, A.D. 1660; The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (Russia)

THE SOUTH COUNTRY

WHEN I am living in the Midlands
⁠That are sodden and unkind,
I light my lamp in the evening:
⁠My work is left behind;
And the great hills of the South Country
⁠Come back into my mind.

The great hills of the South Country
⁠They stand along the sea;
And it's there walking in the high woods
⁠That I could wish to be,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
⁠Walking along with me.

The men that live in North England
⁠I saw them for a day:
Their hearts are set upon the waste fells,
⁠Their skies are fast and grey;
From their castle-walls a man may see
⁠The mountains far away.

The men that live in West England
⁠They see the Severn strong,
A-rolling on rough water brown
⁠Light aspen leaves along.
They have the secret of the Rocks,
⁠And the oldest kind of song.

But the men that live in the South Country
⁠Are the kindest and most wise,
They get their laughter from the loud surf,
⁠And the faith in their happy eyes
Comes surely from our Sister the Spring
⁠When over the sea she flies;
The violets suddenly bloom at her feet,
⁠She blesses us with surprise.

I never get between the pines
⁠But I smell the Sussex air;
Nor I never come on a belt of sand
⁠But my home is there.
And along the sky the line of the Downs
⁠So noble and so bare.

A lost thing could I never find,
⁠Nor a broken thing mend:
And I fear I shall be all alone
⁠When I get towards the end.
Who will be there to comfort me
⁠Or who will be my friend?

I will gather and carefully make my friends
⁠Of the men of the Sussex Weald,
They watch the stars from silent folds,
⁠They stiffly plough the field.
By them and the God of the South Country
⁠My poor soul shall be healed.

If I ever become a rich man,
⁠Or if ever I grow to be old,
I will build a house with deep thatch
⁠To shelter me from the cold,
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
⁠And the story of Sussex told.

I will hold my house in the high wood
⁠Within a walk of the sea,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
⁠Shall sit and drink with me.

~Hilaire Belloc

High Weald view (Wikipedia source)

“Great wealth”

“FOR great wealth is accumulated by cunning or chance, or a mixture of the two. Cunning has nothing to do with high qualities; it is rather a presumption against them; while chance has nothing to do with them either. Therefore it is that men are always complaining after meeting So-and-so, that he seemed to be astonishingly stupid, though he made a million in ten years and started as a pauper.”

~ Hilaire Belloc: Essays of a Catholic

FEBRUARY

The winter moon has such a quiet car
That all the winter nights are dumb with rest.
She drives the gradual dark with drooping crest,
And dreams go wandering from her drowsy star.
Because the nights are silent, do not wake:
But there shall tremble through the general earth,
And over you, a quickening and a birth.
The sun is near the hill-tops for your sake.

The latest born of all the days shall creep
To kiss the tender eyelids of the year;
And you shall wake, grown young with perfect sleep,
And smile at the new world, and make it dear
With living murmurs more than dreams are deep.
Silence is dead, my Dawn; the morning's here.

~Hilaire Belloc

The Month of February, by Abel Grimmer (c.1570–c.1620).
Oil on panel, private collection.

THE CAPITALIST PRESS

“I SAY that our interest lies in the question of degree. It always does. The philosopher said: “All things are a matter of degree, and who shall establish degree?” But I think we are agreed – and by “we” I mean all educated men with some knowledge of the world around us – that the degree to which the suppression of truth, the propagation of falsehood, the artificial creation of opinion, and the boycott of inconvenient doctrine have reached in the great Capitalist Press for some time past in England, is at least dangerously high.”

~Hilaire Belloc: The Free Press, Ch. VIII.

Read more: The Free Press

"The breakdown of Christendom"

“Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it―we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today.”

~ Hilaire Belloc: The Great Heresies

JANUARY

It freezes- all across a soundless sky
The birds go home. The governing dark's begun:
The steadfast dark that waits not for a sun;
The ultimate dark wherein the race shall die. ...

Death, with his evil finger to his lip,
Leers in at human windows, turning spy
To learn the country where his rule shall lie
When he assumes perpetual generalship.

The undefeated enemy, the chill
That shall benumb the voiceful earth at last,
Is master of our moment, and has bound
The viewless wind it-self. There is no sound.
It freezes. Every friendly stream is fast.
It freezes; and the graven twigs are still.

~Hilaire Belloc

Winter Landscape, by Jan van de Cappelle (1626-1679). Oil on canvas.