Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, FIELDS OF THOUGHT, by CHARLES R. MURPHY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

FIELDS OF THOUGHT, by                    
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.





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