The young man and the young woman had brought what they called a picnic lunch to the bank of the stream that flowed past the cliff and the cave. On the stony bank of the stream, the two persons had made a campfire in order to boil water for tea. Later, they had eaten their lunch and had drunk their tea while sitting on opposite sides of the campfire.
The young man had never proposed to the young woman that he and she should marry, but it seemed to be understood between them that they would do so during the coming year or, perhaps, the year after. The young man and the young woman lived far apart. He had spent his childhood and his youth in various suburbs of Melbourne but he was now the sole teacher at a small primary school in the district surrounding the cliff that had a cave at its base. She had spent her childhood and her youth in a small town in the district mentioned but now lived in Melbourne with an aunt and an uncle. He and she met only during every alternate weekend, sometimes in Melbourne and sometimes in the small town mentioned. They had few opportunities to be alone together anywhere but in the small motor car owned by the young man.
The young man and the young woman had long before told one another that they were interested in what they called literature. While they drank their tea on opposite sides of the campfire, the young man went on talking about the book that he had earlier called a neglected masterpiece. He told the young woman that he admired the style of the author of the book, which style had been praised by some commentators as one of the most exemplary prose styles of the nineteenth century. He, the young man, said that he sometimes observed himself falling into the style of the author mentioned while he, the young man, was writing one or another of the long letters that he wrote each week to the young woman. Above all, so the young man said to the young woman, he admired the author mentioned for having written the neglected masterpiece in such a way that no reader or commentator had been able to decide whether the work was fiction or autobiography or a blend of the two.
When the young man and the young woman had set out on their so-called picnic, the young man had supposed that the site of the picnic would be a place beneath a steep embankment overgrown with grass and bushes and that he and the young woman would make a campfire on mostly level grass shaded, at intervals, by clumps of bushes. Having thus supposed, the young man formulated a certain plan. If he could be supposed to have formulated his plan in the style of the writer that he so much admired — the writer of the so-called neglected masterpiece — then the young man could be reported as having decided to take with the young woman, on the day of the picnic, many more liberties than he had previously taken with her.
The young man had abandoned the plan mentioned soon after the young woman had led him down to the stony bank of the stream with the cave at its base. And yet, after he and the young woman had drunk tea on opposite sides of the campfire, and while they walked together along the stony bank of the stream near the opening of the cave at the base of the cliff, the young man had confided for the first time to the young woman that he had already begun to write what he hoped would be the first of a number of works of fiction that he would write. The young man and the young woman had then debated several matters.
An image of mostly level grassy countryside appeared in the mind of a man while he was trying to learn by heart a poem believed to have been written a hundred and fifteen years before his birth. In certain image-places in the middle distance or the far distance of the image-countryside, the man caused to appear areas of bare image-soil on which were strewn image-branches and image-twigs, as though a hedgerow or a copse or a spinney or even a line of trees had previously stood in each of the bare image-places but had recently been removed.
The image-countryside was intended by the man mentioned to represent a certain small district in England where the man who had written the poem mentioned had spent his first forty years before he had been confined in first one and then a second asylum for lunatics during his remaining thirty years. The man learning the poem had read more than twenty-five years before, in a book the title and the author of which he had later forgotten, the claim that the poet’s having been confined for thirty years was in large part the result of the trees’ and the hedgerows’ having been removed during his lifetime from the small district just mentioned. The person making this claim had written in an essay that the poet had been so attached to the earlier landscape that its destruction had unbalanced his mind. The poet, so the writer of the essay had claimed, had relied on the landscape and the plants and birds and animals living in it to remind him continually of where he was and even of who he was. The man trying to learn the poem had taken this claim to mean that the poet conceived of his own mind as an image-landscape comprising mostly level grassy countryside with image-hedgerows and image-copses and scattered image-trees.
The man trying to learn the poem thought of his own mind as an image-landscape and had sometimes tried to write one or another poem while he seemed to have one or another detail of that landscape in view. The man, however, had failed as a poet and had even failed somewhat as a man, or so he supposed. He had thus failed because he had never seen clearly enough the details of his image-mind. He had too often speculated about what could have been known only to the personages who lived out their lives behind the windows glinting in the late afternoon near some or another line of distant image-trees: the name of one or another flowering plant or the nesting place of one or another bird among the grass of the mostly level image-countryside.
The man trying to learn the poem was reminded of his most serious lack whenever he recalled the poet’s supposing often during his later life that he and his wife of twenty and more years had never met and that his close companion was still the girl who had been his close companion during his schooldays and his early youth. The man trying to learn the poem might himself have been accompanied by the sort of image-female who had followed the poet even into one after another lunatic asylum if only hers had not been merely an image-childhood in some or another remote image-place.
The man succeeded in learning the poem and sometimes recited one or another stanza to one or another of his friends or his drinking companions, although none of them was interested enough to ask what sort of man had composed the poem. If anyone had so asked, he would have been told that the poet’s patrons and admirers had been often affronted or distressed to learn that the author of poems expressing what he once called his love of rural objects often drank ale until he became ill or insensible. The man who sometimes recited the poem had first learned it after he had felt sympathy for the poet and after he, the man, had been annoyed that some of the poet’s readers had begrudged him his weakness.
More than thirty years after he had learned the poem, the man could remember only the following lines from the first stanza.
We’d sooner suck ale through a blanket
Than thimbles of wine from a glass.
The man remembered also the following lines from the last stanza.
And we’ll sit it in spite of the weather
Till we tumble dead drunk on the plain.
… Desperate eves,
when the wind-bitten hills turned violet
along their rims, and the earth huddled her heat