Classic and Contemporary Poetry
FIELDS OF THOUGHT, by CHARLES R. MURPHY First Line: For him the walls are not finality Last Line: Food for her dark fidelity to light. Subject(s): Farm Life; Agriculture; Farmers | ||||||||
For him the walls are not finality But bounds to show what is not yet his own; Or termini set up in briefest stone To mark his outer growth in just degree; Not by their height is any noon less free To make its shadow short or draw the sown Seeds to their flower in the distant zone Where kinship may exist with what men see. Yet not by swiftness of his mind's desire Will he give over love of lowly plants That outtop not the wall, or call it treason That he should rest a while when the sun slants, Forgetting momently his high empire To be with sleepy grass a shady season. Even the simple things his hands can make Beautiful in their simplicity; So that their rhythm of being seems to be Law to his fingers; but when thoughts awake To thrust him for afield, the firm sods break To the gray water of the eastward sea Where the low lying islands give no lee To any boat his mind dares not forsake. Thus does the tragedy of human thought Cry out of ugliness its wild demand -- Not for a place near beauty on the shelf, But for the touch of a diviner hand To mould it firmly and return it, wrought Sanctified, to very beauty's self. For forty years he played the fool, they said, Giving his life to thoughts of a dead man, Then woke to terror at the wasted span Of living life he thus had forfeited; But while they talked, his very silence spread Roots in the desert that their fears foreran, Clasped the foundations where their doubts began, And from deep stones drew forth the living bread. So that for some the outlawed desert seemed Part of the field whereon their fresh life grew, Green with its rising toward the day-to-be Of harvest; so that they, and men that dreamed, And death, and life, beneath the self-same dew Need be but what they are, necessity. There came a day when fields at last were shorn And barns were crammed, but spirits empty still As the gray fields of stubble that the chill Night of the longer shadow made forlorn; And flesh was full, but in men's minds was born Desire that, like the fences, ran until The forest loomed, to seek beyond the hill A harvest never reaped from fields of corn. Out of the houses came they one by one, Using the fields as cattle tread a lane, Spread fan-like, hurrying with breath that panted Till lost in the mist of hope upon the plain, Some sought for prey with sudden eye and gun, Others to reap from fields they had not planted. "We shall find tracks," they said, "in the vague night Of the deeper forest westward where the snows Are clean; perhaps we shall find one who knows How from the dark to lead us to the light, From hunger to our food; we shall have sight Of how the wielder of the seasons goes Through endless thickets to a Spring that blows June to our hearts forever without blight," But when they came back no man dared pretend That they had broken bread of winter's baking; Their famished hunt had brought them now, footworn Like panting dogs to where the ploughed fields end, And they stood trembling, with their breath retaking Hope of the planted, inevitable corn. He was thought-centred in the leafless wood With eyes half shut, as though the break of spring Might rise to song before the fluttering Of any hoped-for bird was seen; he could Stand beyond the grief of earthlihood, Beneath the shadow of the wild hawk's wing Suffer he peace that he alone could bring When peace became the thing it understood. He stood within the thing his thougth had found, While others, gazing, said: "The spring has mended The breakage that the winter had begun; How sure the sun when seeds are underground; Something has found its own but is not ended; How small a seed may yet decree a sun." Perhaps of those that they had left behind They thought most of a woman whose eyes were dark, Saying: "This blindness thickens like the bark On living oak and in the end will bind Her being to the measure of a mind Shut in forever to the narrow are That sightless years must circle with their mark Till dust at heart be all that light may find." Yet when they came to her with less than truth, They seemed themselves to be but wind that shook Her tree-like living with uncertain might; So that her senses, like quick leaves that move, Shed falsehood, and of the remainder took Food for her dark fidelity to light. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...KICKING THE LEAVES by DONALD HALL THE FARMER'S BOY: WINTER by ROBERT BLOOMFIELD THE FARMER'S BOY: SPRING by ROBERT BLOOMFIELD THE FARMER'S BOY: SUMMER by ROBERT BLOOMFIELD THE FARMER'S BOY: AUTUMN by ROBERT BLOOMFIELD ALL THINGS FLOW by CHARLES R. MURPHY |
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