Yesterday, Boris Pasternak on swifts; today, Andrew Young on swallows. The latter’s paean to the aerial acrobats can be found in his Selected Poems (Carcanet, £9.95).

THE SWALLOWS

All day – when early morning shone

With every dewdrop its own dawn

And when cockchafers were abroad

Hurtling like missiles that had lost their road –

The swallows twisting here and there

Round unseen corners of the air

Upstream and down so quickly passed

I wondered that their shadows flew as fast.

They steeplechased over the bridge

And dropped down to a drowning midge

Sharing the river with the fish,

Although the air itself was their chief dish.

Blue-winged snowballs! until they turned

And then with ruddy breasts they burned;

All in one instant everywhere,

Jugglers with their own bodies in the air.

cockchafer=a large grey-brown beetle