Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE SOWER, by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE SOWER, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Ridge on ridge the great fields lie
Last Line: And the prayers of broken hearts.
Subject(s): England; Harvest; Labor & Laborers; English; Work; Workers


RIDGE on ridge the great fields lie,
Endless under the autumn sky;
Scattered huts, but never a tree
On the brown waves of fertility:
And upon them, strong and light,
From dawn's dusk to that of night,
Moves a man, forward and back, --
Like a Titan near at hand,
Like a fly from overhead, --
Scattering ever in his track
On the grim, unwilling land
The grey germs of living bread.
He sows the bitter seed of Time,
The long harvest of life and death,
And the prayers of broken hearts.
While his legs beneath him stride,
With his right hand in a sack
He dips, then quick-flinging back,
Casts the wheat-grains far and wide,
Furrow on furrow, row on row,
He traverses acres so,
Unarmoured 'gainst the bitter chill,
Unstrengthened but by his own will: --
His feet are swollen, blackened, ground
With the clumsy clogs they're bound,
Yet they spring with power sure,
To the last day they endure:
His legs, in stringy sinew cast,
Millions of engines have surpassed;
Above his shirt, tattered at breast,
Works a gnarled and hairy chest;
His arms swing mightier than steel cranes,
His grizzled skull is bared to rains,
And in his deep eyes light does lie
As in a snake's or an eagle's eye.
He sows the bitter seed of Time,
The long harvest of life and death,
And the prayers of broken hearts.
He has not known art's mystery.
Progress? It has passed him by.
History speaks naught of him.
And his spirit, rude and dim,
Never hears a call to wake
While the dark fields freeze and bake
Under this cruel, empty heaven:
Whereto, as by mockery driven,
All his hope -- how little! -- fled
From the terrible crushing dread
Of old age and pain and death,
Sole reward for all his breath
Spent in toil, barren and drear.
His forefathers have walked here,
And their footsteps mark them not:
The strong arms wherewith they tossed
The grain, are rotted long to dust:
And his son in the self-same spot
Must trudge steadily in his place,
And behind him, his son's face
Comes, marked with toil, -- and a great race
To the dim future stride on by,
Long as the leaden earth shall fly,
Till the sun falls from the sky,
They sow the bitter seed of Time,
The long harvest of life and death,
And the prayers of broken hearts.
Yet, lacking him, all things were vain:
'Tis his sweat, his blood, his pain,
Which have made all that shall be.
What the earth could not, that he
Is doing, and he knows it not!
From the brown breast, no more hot,
Of his own mother tearing bread,
Without which all men were dead.
Under those feet that crush the clods
Spring the heroes and the gods:
At the great gesture of that hand.
Science and art overspread the land:
From those fingers, bent with pain,
Cities fall, as fills the grain:
And life's pulse, more than all beside,
Hangs on the rhythm of that stride: --
He sows the bitter seed of Time,
The long harvest of life and death,
And the prayers of broken hearts.
Steadily, to the brown fields bare,
He gives green life which makes the air
Anew, from a stagnant, breathed-out fen,
To a moving freedom, fit for men.
He casts life's crimson slender thread
From the dark caverns of the dead
Out to a vast futurity,
So full of light, we may not see.
He scatters the stars upon the night:
Through him alone in endless flight
Of boundless joys and tragedies,
They move, on the cold and hollow seas
Of emptiness, which knows not death,
Since it nor life nor sorrow hath.
Unwitting, even as God hath wrought,
From thoughtlessness he weaves firm thought:
He knows naught save what he creates,
He has achieved his mastering fates,
And, mystery of mystery,
To himself he prays -- ah, me! --
That what he has done may forgiven be.
He sows the bitter seed of Time,
The long harvest of life and death,
And the prayers of broken hearts.





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