Michael Spring was born in 1953 and grew up in post-war London before moving to the Cotswolds in the mid 1960s. After university, he followed a career in Art teaching in Northumberland and in Oxfordshire. He draws much of the inspiration for his artwork and his writing from his travels and from the natural world.
In ‘Marlborough Downs’ he captures the beauty of the place tinged with the poignancy of the solitary walker.
Marlborough Downs
The larks cry in the chalkhill blue of air
As knapsack’d walkers, hung with camera gear
Look out across the downland’s humming heat
And couples wrestle with the plastic picnic seat
The children run the ancient rampart tops
And from a nearby hidden thorny copse
A cuckoo marks the passing of the hours
As farmers look up, spit and pray for passing showers.
From Uffington, I took the rutted lane
Which has the open ridge top as its line
Where wide the waves of early barley lap
And hewn from chalk, the great horse gallops at the lip.
And I walked on above the lambing fields,
The tidy grooming of the Lambourn folds,
Beyond the oilseed’s iridescent gleams
Above the blossoms borne by flinty streams.
And yet these wonders seemed to take a paler hue
For I walked there alone, and was so far from you.
Michael Spring
The Ridgeway May 1987
For ‘The Downs at Dusk‘ by Kenneth Spring
(Michael’s father) click below.