Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE SHEPHERD, by HERBERT TRENCH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE SHEPHERD, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: When I am worn amid the burning dust
Last Line: Melodies cool as water, soft as sleep.
Subject(s): Shepherds & Shepherdesses


I

WHEN I am worn amid the burning dust
Of high-wall'd cities, round the mill-track drear
Bearing the beam and yoke, as mortals must
Who by their lower selves win lodging here,
Oft, as among some ancient desert horde
Their King flung up the netted bird on high
Whose flight should show the nearest pass whereby
To cross the mountains from the sands abhorred,
Even so cut I the cord,
Dismiss my soul on its delirious wings
Spurning the dull den where the body dwells
In yon green cabinets of grass to stray,
Along the liquid mirrors to delay,
Yonder, in the wished land of wells,
By the throbbing of full waters, gleamy springs!

II

Distilled out of the swift enormous skies
But nursed in darkness old, inscrutable,
Twixt Sinodun and its twin mount Harphill
By Thames I know a Wood-Spring takes its rise,
Azured and overbough'd, a margin still
Untainted, only known to beasts and birds,
And alive, like all things wholly beautiful,
Exquisite, deathless, seeming self-engendered.
Sand-pulses, bubbles, are its only words;
And wide the region of the mountainous earth
Cistern'd for the making of that little pool!
And there what spirit-freshness comes to birth!
Thither I voyage, to a dream surrendered,
And rays are golden there, and noon is cool.

III

Or I, a Shepherd, am in Thessaly;
And the twilight village cries "Hath he not come
On the last scented load of myrtle home?" . . .
He sits in the great valley green and still
Blocked by the snow-capt Mountain, and his sheep,
Tawny and dark, roam far and crop their fill
In the wide pastures, by the river deep.
His wandering fingers teach the stops at will
Melodies cool as water, soft as sleep.

IV

And once to him the Mountain spake,
"Climb! Here canst larger music make!
I know thy heart, and all its ache!
For, since thy craving is and ban
Conquest of earth to plan,
And to come up as if by right
All the kingdoms of earth to scan
With the soul and the sight of a seraph,
The strength of a man,
Therefore, lest it should break,
Thy heart for my arch-lute I take;
My tarns and ghylls shall sing through thee
All Olympus and all Thessaly!"

V

Then, lo, on a peak above the peaks am I!
Above the waves of forest, vale and fell,
Above the torrent's voice, the clink of bell,
The flock, the scythe, of sparse humanity;
Above the earth-enflamed ring of sky
That hems our footing; so I stand alone
Isled in the last and dreadful light on high
And sovran silence of the air and stone. . .
Slowly the plains, those warm and breathing plains,
The hearth-lit villages that sleep and play,
Whose ceaseless blood and its in-dwelling pains
In volumes of sea-darkness surge and sway
In the heart most solitary, sink away. . . .
Nothing but starred immensity remains.

Chilly withdrawals yours, vast Light, vast Love!
Though the skies swarm with tremblers faintly bright
I am exile in this glimmering infinite;
For centuries Man may see but stars above!
Yet shall those summits of scarred ages burn
Afresh, and all those lights be quenched in One!
Pure new breath shall arouse
Our sunk horizons and our sapless boughs!
The wrinkled AEons brood on that return,
And seal'd in's prison-house
The changeless blood keeps memory of the Sun.

VI

And so when Night hath rolled away undone,
Joyful my foot is bounding down the peak;
Rich-memoried, I am eager for the yoke,
Like some young torrent swollen white with rains
How willing then my strength rejoins the plains!
"Where is our Shepherd?" cry the village-folk. . . .

He sits in the great valley green and still
Block'd by the snow-capt mountain, and his sheep,
Tawny and dark, roam far and crop their fill
In the wide pastures by the river deep;
His wandering fingers teach the stops at will
Melodies cool as water, soft as sleep.





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