I am aware of the blinded mole, bat and owl, I must be blind to ‘Some-
one’ in turn – and of course, any lack of evidence of such a ‘Some-one’
only supports the suspicion; in the same way a speaker walks round the
deserted ‘Old Stone House’, aware that though there is ‘nobody at the
window’, tiptoe is the only suitable approach in the silence in which ‘a
friendless face is peering, and a clear still eye / Peeps closely through the
casement as my step goes by’. This uncanny alternation between nothing
and someone is also the situation in which ‘The Little Green Orchard’
suspends its reader. ‘Some one is always sitting there, / In the little green
orchard’ it begins, and just what weight to put on ‘there’ is the question; is
the someone always sitting there, or is the someone always sittingthere,on
that spot? In trying to determine how much stress to lay on ‘there’, the
reader could allow either three beats or four:
Some one in shadow is sitting there,
In the little green orchard.The next stanza, however, suggests that four is correct:
Yes, and when twilight’s falling softly
On the little green orchard.I have heard voices calling softly
In the little green orchard.
But however suitable a four-beat line is to avoid the line tailing off into
two or three unstressed syllables, it would run against the syntax of the
lines in the third and fourth stanzas, since the verbs suggest ‘there’ should
be casual and unstressed, as if trying to make the poem’s obsessive refrain
seem more normal:
Not that I am afraid of being there,
In the little green orchard
[.. .]
I’ve sat there, whispering and listening there,
In the little green orchard
[.. .]
Only it’s strange to be feeling there,
In the little green orchard.When the last line iterates that ‘Some One is waiting and watching
there, / In the little green orchard’, ‘there’ has by now become a hinge
between ‘watching there’ and ‘there, in the little green orchard’ and its
grammatical usage and rhythmic weight depend upon which side of the
126 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism