Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SONG OF RENEWAL: 1, by JOHN FREEMAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SONG OF RENEWAL: 1, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I walked near sunset through wet fields
Last Line: "the bones that you would bury there will never turn to dust."
Subject(s): Death; Fields; Graves; Dead, The; Pastures; Meadows; Leas; Tombs; Tombstones


I WALKED near sunset through wet fields towards the leafless beechen shaws
That no more warmed the air with fire and gave new colours to the sun.
I saw a man that digged with spade all silver in the silver light,
Heaping the soft clay on the grass. His eyes with the same pale light shone.

Each looked at each, and to my eye he answered: "I am digging a grave,
Needs must be deep, and time is short, and cloudy night comes on apace.
And weary, weary is digging, for I've digged a hundred wasted graves,
And this must deeper be than any digged in other fields and days."

Each looked at each, and to my eye he answered: "'Tis the past I bury,
Buried already thrice and thrice and thrice a hundred times in vain;
Buried in cities sunken by the restless worm's uprising,
And watery cities whose green-weedy streets no step may wake again;

"And in the darkened mountain caves, where all the frozen winds find way,
And where eternal roots of trees are ribbed about the breast of earth;
And in those lonely isles amid the mist and waves of northern seas:—
Buried a hundred times; a hundred times from vain burial broken forth.

"And now, on this cold hillside, where so many a past forgot is buried,
English, Roman, Iberian, I dig another deeper grave
To bury the new-dead past, the past that in few years engulfed the earth
With sorrow, and pained darkness, and made the earth one grave."

"O deeper, dig deeper, yet never deep enough,"
I answered as he lifted slow his silver spade and thrust.
"Deeper, deeper, deeper, but never deep enough to hide—
The bones that you would bury there will never turn to dust."





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