As the wind blows

As the wind blows by Eden Phillpotts is a collection of poems written in the early 20th century. Lyrical and reflective, it centres on Dartmoor and wider landscapes, the turning seasons, and the human response to nature, art, love, and mortality.

Across varied modes—pastoral sketches, elegies, dramatic monologues, and narrative pieces—the book celebrates rivers, tors, woods, birds, and weather; recalls friendships and a lost brother; honours poets and war dead; and reimagines myth. Devon settings recur (Dart, Eylesbarrow, Rundlestone, Cherrybrook), while playful and rustic voices mingle with meditations on time, change, and fate. Highlights include portraits of months and moons, the glittering “Tiger” tale of instinct and death, a graveyard’s wry roll call of the “doubtful ones,” tributes to Swinburne and Keats, the Gallipoli lament, and the long “Fruit of the Tree,” where Adam and Eve, cast from Eden, discover love as the true, redemptive knowledge. Throughout, the verse moves from luminous nature-painting to intimate grief and quiet resilience, finding in the moor’s permanence a measure for human hope and loss. (This is an automatically generated summary.)