Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A PLOUGHMAN AT ELTHAM, by VICTOR GUSTAVE PLARR


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A PLOUGHMAN AT ELTHAM, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Cross-legged, and brown as his field in hue
Last Line: Whither its poor go down.
Subject(s): Change; Labor & Laborers; Plowing & Plowmen; Work; Workers


Cross-legged, and brown as his field in hue,
The old ploughman treads behind his antique share,
His wrinkled hands, keeping the coulter true,
Grown huge in the keen air.

The red walls of the gardens close at hand
Enclose the promise of rich-blossomed spring;
Through all the corners of the hazy land
The larks and thrushes sing.

Strange that I stand to-day with eyes intent
On such old simple things are horse and plough,
The town's distracting grim environment
Rend'ring them marvels now;

Strange too, and sad, that he who ploughs has grown
Even 'mid these fields an unfamiliar thing,
Sum of old forces long since overthrown,
Old creeds that aye take wing.

Holbein once painted in fantastic mode
A ploughman and four horses, to whose sides
Death darts with furiously uplifted goad
And obscene elfin strides.

Our century, grown dazed and out of breath,
Pants past the honestest of Adam's sons:
In every furrow every kind of death
Beside this peasant runs!

Out there, not three miles off, great London looms,
Each long new street a throat that still desires
The sap of earth, each house of sordid rooms
A wreck of the bird's choirs.

He is, I think, the last of all his kin
Who ear these lands: his children all have sold
Their birthright for scant bread or hunger in
The streets not pav'n with gold.

Bless'd shall he be if that he still retain
His cottage with its flowers and thyme and sage,
And in the churchyard there, a cramp'd demesne
Held since King Wihtred's age;

Bless'd, nay twice bless'd, if that he need not brave
The gaunt promiscuous workhouse in the town,
The base oblivion of a common grave
Whither its poor go down.





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