Classic Poem

For long, so long, this timeless afternoon
My body has lain in sun-receiving fields
On the wood's border, by the bounteous elms,
An unbeliever in approaching night
And the cold, winter-prophesying dew,
Heedless of all, forgetting all but now.

So when the creaking of a country cart
Reaches my wind-hushed heart, my thought divines
Its red and faded wheels, its Saxon self,
But gropingly, I have forgotten carts.
The seated driver towering on its side,
Who jolts at leisure down the long, low road
Towards the dun-thatched village, fares too far
For my lulled sense to follow. Even the old
Labourer sunning in a Windsor chair
With pink and purple asters at his door,
Who, as I passed this morning, stirred awake
My fathers' fathers' long-acquainted loves,
Even his image is too hard to hold
Lapped as I lie in this Lethean gold.

This hushing wind on every side, as though
The world's invisible sails swelled softly out
And bore me to Eternity, laid low,
Like the dead knights and nobles of the north,
When their last battle had gone well with them,
Among Northumbrian boulders quite at rest;
Or as they lie, pure-effigied in sleep
And stone in shadowed aisles. Yet nowhere pours
This consecrating warmth but out of doors.

Now lift your lids and turn from dreams away,
And watch, more perfectly, as here you may,
The dear progression of a country day,
That friendliness which never had a name,
Serene, eventful. Look, two pheasants came!
Among the faded thistles bleached and brown,
They foot it featly picking silver down;
They sun their long soft tails, they disappear
Behind the elm-boles. Hips and haws are here
Contented (it would seem they had almost said)
To know another day of turning red.

Sudden, an echoing bang, a farmer's gun.
The settled rooks rise circling, one by one
From the tall elm. The undistracted skies
Fill with an old cacophony of cries:
I spy, I can,
A dog. A man.
What? Where? Which one?
A man. A gun.
He's here. He's where?
He's gone. Beware.
Cry out. Cry on.
He's gone.
Then, suavely slow and gradually dumb,
Back in a circling saraband they come
Each to his elm-bough, neither fast nor soon,
Black judges of the golden afternoon.

The new-born calf lies down to sleep again
In the long, growing shadows of the plain;
His swing-tail mother feeds, and now and then
To guard his safety in a world of men
Turns a slow gazing head; whilst gazing I
At peace upon this rounded planet lie.
This planet soon from the benignant sun
And so sure-seeming amplitude of light
To turn away, and like a great horse plunge
Deep in submerging lapping seas of cold
And ever-darkening space.
I saw last night
A streak of sunset over mounded stacks
Bleak as the eyes of ghosts; and mist comes soon.
Even this last largesse, these blackberries
Warm on the hedge, are purple-dark as storms,
Storms that will wake the safely-sleeping child
In midnight terror, sway the blackened elms
In gulfs of night, and the clear stars devour.
And these rich fields will darken in an hour.

O I must go and find my morning way,
The farm, the gate, and the old labourer
Whose image by the cottage door returns,
Though earlier drowned in dreams. His waiting hands
Like tree-roots, resting, and that lifted head,
So soon to know the dark of death, no more
Like this unconquered planet to emerge
On April days renewed with daffodils.

His unexperienced spring will be elsewhere —
Only the dead can tell how strange, how fair,
How certain, like the look their faces bear
After the storm and ravage. Now it seems
Though all creation shares the departing light —
The roads, the shafted waggons put to rest,
The cropping beasts, the rooks in evening flight,
The barns, the stubble golden from the west,
The heavy elms — yet most of all to those
Old patient eyes no temporal spring will bless,
This vast, warm earthly autumn tenderness
Is come to say Amen, before they close.