Mowing

Here, where the world is quiet;
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,

An Episode AND the first grey of morning fill'd the east,
And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream.

There are four men mowing down by the Isar;
I can hear the swish of the scythe-strokes, four
Sharp breaths taken: yea, and I
Am sorry for what's in store.

The first man out of the four that's mowing
Is mine, I claim him once and for all;
Though it's sorry I am, on his young feet, knowing
None of the trouble he's led to stall.

As he sees me bringing the dinner, he lifts
His head as proud as a deer that looks
Shoulder-deep out of the corn; and wipes
His scythe-blade bright, unhooks

The meadow yielded thirteen bales an acre.
“Was that a record?” I asked one of the experts.
“It must have been a record. When was the last time
you manured that meadow? Eighteen eighty-one?”
Yet it is beautiful, whether mowed or not,
After its saddest harvest, stubble bristled
sparsely, yet the stalks stood up like Christians.
Now that the second crop is coming in,

Into a crock of gold he’d set some weeds,
Behold swart devils in the sunniest weather;
He would lump the saint and the courtesan together,
Most miserably jangling all the creeds.

The prurient multitude heard he was mad,
Yet nosed his books for some pornography.
The censors doubted his virginity,
And secretly conned the works that they forbade.

Reporters found this dangerous oddity
In rusty pantaloons, mowing the green,
And wondered how so dull a wretch could have seen
A naked Venus disturbing an alien sea.

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpeck’d cherries,
Melons and raspberries,