I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

– Emily Dickenson

These were the lines I had to memorize in Grade 6, my first acquaintance with English-language poetry.  Thrown into a world as an alien, the school world and a language I knew no more than a few words back then. Yet the rhythmics of English poetry were fascinating, and although I had no clue what a moor or heather were (being in that regard less informed than Dickenson herself), I thought those strange sounds were beautiful when recited. Then I looked into the dictionary and the moor, the sea, the heather and the waves suddenly came to life, with the wind and the fog joining in.

That scene from Dickenson’s poem oddly mixed with the « twa corbies » of an old Scottish poem we had also read in that class:

As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies makin a mane;
The tane unto the ither say,
« Whar sall we gang and dine the-day? »

Two crows wondering what they will eat, finding a freshly killed knight whose body had just been forgotten by everyone except his wife, hound and hawk, but these last ones, well

« His hound is tae the huntin gane,
His hawk tae fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady’s tain anither mate,
So we may mak oor dinner swate. »

Basically, they don’t give a damn. A melancholic wind howl with some sniggering crows that mixes well with the moor and the sea, I guess.