RESTING DURING A CYCLE RIDE, JUNE 1958

In this weather one cannot resist being happy, relaxing in shade.
Larks twitter in shimmering air, and the fields and trees
stretch and drift to green distances in the great sun's singing heat.
Now the breath of a wind stirs the sycamore's starfish-shaped leaves
piled above me translucently, breaking the light into green-
yellow flashes and sunbeams - all moving, like ripples on water,
in wiggles and leaps. In the sunlight are elms, and thick hedges
with blackthorn in flower, and vetches and bindweed; and clover
scattered through the thick grass; and fields yellow with mustard or buttercups,
like splashes of paint on this county of lushness and friendly
bright idiosyncrasies. As an old biplane drones over,
deliberately moving through warm heavy air, it unwittingly shares it
with me, and the gnats like a school of apostrophes dancing,
and the larks, and the blackbird which flirts its broad tail on alighting;
and the couples of gulls sliding frictionless, high in the heavens above me,
calling casually now and then out of sheer boredom: for quiet and lazy
is the pleasure of summer in Devon, when cycling hotly
to places or nowhere particular, there to relax and be useless.