To Walk On Hills/ The City as Landscape

To Walk on Hills

To walk on hills is to employ legs
As porters of the head and heart
Jointly adventuring towards
Perhaps true equanimity.

To walk on hills is to see sights
And hear sounds unfamiliar.
When in wind the pine-tree roars,
When crags with bleatings echo,
When water foams below the fall,
Heart records that journey as memorable indeed;
Head reserves opinion,
Confused by the wind.

A view of three shires and the sea!
Seldom so much at once appears
Of the coloured world, says heart.
Head is glum, says nothing.
Legs become weary, halting
To sprawl in a rock's shelter,
While the sun drowsily blinks
On head at last brought low -
This giddied passenger of legs
That has no word to utter.

Heart does double duty,
As heart, and as head,
With portentous trifling.

A castle on its crag perched
Across the miles between is viewed
With awe as across years.
Now a daisy pleases,
Pleases and astounds, even,
That on a garden lawn could blow
All summer long with no esteem.
And the buzzard's horrid poise,
And the plover's misery,
And the important beetle's
Blue-green-shiny back...

To walk on hills is to employ legs
To march away and lose the day.
Confess, have you known shepherds?
And are they not a witless race
Prone to quaint visions?
Not thus from solitude
(Solitude sobers only)
But from long hilltop striding.

Robert Graves




The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque'.

Susan Sontag, 'On Photography', 1977