This quote from “The Spring of Joy” written when Mary Webb was recuperating from her many bouts of Graves’ disease, seems appropriate for our lockdown days, but we can still turn to nature to bring comfort and hope:
“It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small account in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life. Dawn, seen through a sick woman’s window, however narrow, pulses with the same fresh wonder as it does over the whole width of the sea. A branch of flushed wild-apple brings the same joy as the mauve trumpet – flower of the tropics. One violet is as sweet as an acre of them.”
Thanks to photographer Robert Gwilliam for these uplifting images of beautiful Shrewsbury in springtime. The image of our bronze bust of Mary Webb with a backdrop of blossom is just breathtaking.
This poem,” The Elf ” by Mary describing Shrewsbury was read by Val Littehales at the unveiling of the bust in 2016.
THE ELF
THE ELF
A fair town is Shrewsbury-
The world over
You’ll hardly find a fairer,
In its fields of clover
And rest-harrow, ringed
By hills where curlews call,
And, drunken from the heather,
Black bees fall.
Poplars by Severn,
Lean hand in hand,
Like golden girls dancing
In elfland.
Early there come travelling
On market day
Old men and young men
From far away,
With red fruits of the orchard
And dark fruits of the hill,
Dew-fresh garden stuff,
And mushrooms chill,
Honey from the brown skep,
Brown eggs, and posies
Of gillyflowers and Lent lilies
And blush roses.
And sometimes, in a branch of blossom,
Or a lily deep,
An elf comes, plucked with the flower
In her sleep;
Lifts a languid wing, slow and weary,
Veined like a shell;
Listens, with eyes dark and eerie,
To the church bell;
Creeps further within her shelter of
Of lilac or lily,
Weaving enchantments,
Laughing stilly.
Neither bells in the steeple
Nor books, old and brown,
Can disenchant the people
In the slumbering town.
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- Shrewsbury Square with statue of Clive of India
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- Showing location of Charles Darwin & Mary Webb bust
Thursday, April 23, 2020
