Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, MAIZE IN NORWAY, by EDNA DEAN PROCTOR


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

MAIZE IN NORWAY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: By an inn of wildest norway
Last Line: As that cluster of waving corn.
Alternate Author Name(s): Dean
Subject(s): Americans; Corn; Farm Life; Norway; Agriculture; Farmers


BY an inn of wildest Norway —
A dark fiord below,
And the peaks of the Norska-field, above,
In a waste of gleaming snow;
And between the sombre fir-trees,
The mead where the kine fed free,
And a mountain torrent leaping down
To be lost in the Maelstrom sea —
There, in a narrow garden,
One breezy August morn,
I saw, beside its hardy flowers,
A cluster of Indian Corn!

And I said to blue-eyed Lena
With braided flaxen hair,
The child of the inn who had brought me forth
To see her small parterre,
'Your land lies far to the frozen north,
And a day your summer spans;
Why do you plant the tropic Maize
When frost the harvest bans?
Barley and oats and rye you may reap
Ere yet the snows fall cold,
But the stately Maize, the grain of the sun,
Will never yield its gold.'

''Tis true,' the maiden answered,
'That frost our harvest bans,
But we plant the beautiful, waving Maize!
To please the Americans!
They smile when they see its shining leaves,
And say, on their boundless plains
It grows like a forest, rich and tall,
In the warmth and the mellow rains;
And the bins are filled with its blessed gold
Before the bright year wanes.'

'O child,' I said, 'you have planted well!'
And I thought, that August morn,
As I looked at peak and stream and tree,
The dark fiord and the grassy lea,
There was naught so fair on shore or sea
As that cluster of waving Corn.





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