Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE ECLOGUE, by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN


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THE ECLOGUE, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: So talk ran on, and turning like a lane
Last Line: Seeing below calm trees calm waters gliding.
Alternate Author Name(s): Blunden, Edmund


So talk ran on, and turning like a lane
Discovered meetings loved and left behind,
And pleasure common once came peeping plain,
A sunshine through the late mists of the mind;
Leading these two to warm nigh into song
Upon the river where they dwelt so long;

The ancient river flowing on among
Sweet hopgrounds and their aisles of tasselled bines,
Old crooked orchards, fruit-plats straight and young --
How gently to his sea his wave declines!
Vexed into whirlpools where the sluices roar,
But in a field's length easy as before.

The son, drowsed in imagination stern,
Shaped his remembrance dark and breathless; cries
A sullen god beside a mumbling urn,
A hungry blackness full of evil eyes;
Sees the wind warp, the eddy twirl askance,
As marks of water-witches on their dance.

The very eels seen through his eyes become
Sorcerers, oafish bream grow more than wise,
A babel of tongues shrieks from the sallows dumb,
Weeds coil a web of death for human flies:
Terror would bear him on swift wings away,
But dizzy wonder still would have him stay.

But when the father spoke, the stream was flowing
Innocent on a pasturing flocks beside,
A gentle giant moping not nor mowing,
Heaven's looking-glass with heaven's white pageant pied;
Sweeter companionship he never knew
In morning's sun or evening's rosy dew.

There the vole sunned him by the pollard's heel,
The pollard scored with tow-rope's telling groove;
Far down the flood the singing bells would peal,
The bells would peal, the silver swans would move,
Between the water-mosses' warm green beds,
Where harmless fish could hide their simple heads.

The youth that saw these things and would not see
Peopled the waterholes with passion's dream,
And brought the deathbell moaning over the lea
To cry his "Drowned, drowned, drowned!" against the stream,
And gazed the daemon in his watery meuse,
The swoln ghosts ever starting from the ooze.

But ever in the pauses of his son
The old man set his bright against the dark,
Numbering his curious beauties one by one --
Straight as a ploughman driving on his mark,
Through storms, through stubs, through stones his furrow guiding --
Seeing below calm trees calm waters gliding.





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