Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, GRAY; FOR A PICTURE, by FORD MADOX FORD


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

GRAY; FOR A PICTURE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The firelight gilds the patterns on the walls
Last Line: And wonder who shall do the like again.
Alternate Author Name(s): Hueffer, Ford Hermann; Hueffer, Ford Madox
Subject(s): Death; Farm Life; Graves; Dead, The; Agriculture; Farmers; Tombs; Tombstones


THE firelight gilds the patterns on the walls,
The yellow flames fly upwards from the brands,
On fold and farm the sad grey twilight falls,
And shrouds the downs and hides the hollow lands.

And pensive is the hour and bids the brain
Weave morals from the peeping things of dusk,
Dwelling a moment on the darkling pane,
The tapping roses and the pot of musk.

That picture there—the one the firelight shows:
The poet by a grave, beneath the may,
With ready notebook and unruffled brows
And elegiac pose—you guess it's Gray.

Below, beneath his rounded, withied grave,
A ploughman sleeps, the tablet at his head
Tells the short tale of life that such men have—
The scarcely cold and half-forgotten dead

Who "five and fifty years the furrows trod,"
Such were the time and toil of William Mead
Who passed: "And now, he's resting'neath this sod,"
"And there's an end," you say. 'Twere so indeed.

But William was a ploughman of the best,
Who ploughed his furrow straight from hedge to shaws
From sun in east to sun low down in west,
With following of rooks and gulls and daws.

He taught some score the honest trick of plough—
Crop-headed yokels, youths of clay and loam—
Who learnt his ways and gathered from him how
To drive good team and draw straight furrow home.

Thus when his work was done and done his days
He left a school of workers—to this day
We recognize their touch—and owe due praise
For bread and thought to such as he and Gray.

Who ploughed such furrows each in his own field,
Who sowed such seed and gathered in such grain,
That we still batten on their well-sown yield,
And wonder who shall do the like again.





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