ANDREW Young's delight in watching the little winged acrobats is palpable.

His descriptive lines 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.

The 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=large brown beetle