Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, FAR EAST, by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

FAR EAST, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Old hamlets with your fragrant flowers
Last Line: Now folded like the rest.
Alternate Author Name(s): Blunden, Edmund
Subject(s): Japan; Japanese


OLD hamlets with your fragrant flowers
And honey for the bee,
Your curtained taverns, chiming towers,
Droning songs and twilight hours
And nodding industry --

Fine fields, wide-lapped, whose loveliest-born
Day's first bright cohort finds,
And steals away; whose lustier corn
The red-faced churl invades at morn
And proud as Caesar binds --

Uplands and groves that from the West
Have the last word for me,
Think not your image in my breast
Was darkened when I sang my best
Beside an Eastern sea.

Beside an Eastern sea the pines
In tufty spinneys drowse,
The firefly-grass beneath them shines
Blue-lanterned, and the chaliced vines
Climb witch-like to the boughs;

And girdled green there bask the plains
Where, with his timeless smiles,
And mushroom-hat, brown Vigour gains
His splindling roots, his haulms, his grains --
The Oriental Giles.

He serves a god much like your own,
Who, peeping from the rows,
Brings gourds the greatest ever grown,
And peerless pumpkins; smooths the down
Of these fruits, lacquers those.

Thence the young child at home awaits,
Bright-peering as a mouse,
Her share of country delicates,
And chatters bold to her young mates
About the smoky house.

The bronze cicada twangs all day,
And the silver-soft at night
Cools the snake's thicket by the way
Where heaps the sturdy disarray
Of husbandry's delight.

In rural music bold or frail
Contentment's anthem fills,
And, roving the rude-ripened vale,
If restless spirits sometime fail,
Here too are heavenly hills.

Sleep's master-dream there stands alone:
The mount of East and West!
The still hour come, his monstrous cone
Is a timid flower this morning blown,
Now folded like the rest.





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