This is the time of year when the fields are golden with buttercups and the cow-parsley froths in the hedgerows and leans over the road. An old friend from Lancashire came to spend a few days with me last week. As we drove along the lanes near my home she suddenly said that she was reminded of lines from a poem. They were from a poem that Vaughan Williams had set to music and she quoted Where the cow parsley skirts the hawthorn hedge'. How apt this description was of our country lanes in May. We looked in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations to see if we could find the rest of the poem and its author, but to no avail. After my friend had returned to Lancashire I decided to look on the internet and in no time there it was. Silent Noon by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. And the whole poem was there too! Thank goodness for computers !
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