Ethelbert White lived through the Great Depression in the United Kingdom, during the first year of which Eva Gore-Booth wrote her poem, The Vagrant’s Romance. Both pieces, along with Frederick Delius’s “A Song of Summer” focus blissfully on the simple wonders and beauties of the world, rather than the grief that the UK experienced in that time.

“Wise with the lore of those hidden things,

Learnt from Lord Christ in His wanderings,

Beggar and reaper and shepherd and slave,

I am one who rests not in any grave;

I will follow each stormy light divine,

And the secret of all things shall be mine.

These things have I seen, would you bid me mourn

That I was never an Emperor born?”

-Eva Gore-Booth, The Vagrant’s Romance

Ethelbert White (1891-1972), Waiting Wagon (ca. 1925)

Tags: Nature, The Mundane