July 7th

1866 - Oxfordshire

July 7. Fine.—Passing cloud-shadows soaking the woods. Pleasant precision of hay-cocks and swathes with shadow on one side. Bleached look of uncut fields. Those ox-eye-like flowers in grain fields smell deliciously. Strange pretty scatter-droop of barley ears, their beards part outside like the fine crispings of smooth running water on piers etc. Holding one up to the sky so that the top hairs should be about horizontal (the rest following their radiation down to the ear itself, which would hang down) noticed the instant after removing it a tiny needle-like sort of rain in the air at right angles of course to the line of the spikes. Whiteness of the pine-buds. Lombardy poplars built high and with dice-like leaves. Soar of the poplar.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest whose 20th-century fame established him posthumously among the leading Victorian poets.)