page 7

Spring on the Plain

Captured and gentled, harnessed to use of man;
  Harrowed and harvested, charted to human hold;
With a price branded, noble and savage plain,
  Hereto have untold ages swept down water and stones.
Quarried and roaded, sown with essaying grass-seed,
Sown with fleecy herds, scaled by defying fences,
Dog-watched and fire-purged, free, tempestuous mountains,
  Hereto uncounted centuries have rolled down boulders and snow.

Blade-sprung paddocks and spaces of pregnant plough,
  The man-disposed prospect; and, rounds of misty green,
Soft-spun as seed-balls adrift on level fields,
  Willows laced about the course of water-races and streams;
Gold-traced pastures, incrustations on foot-hills
Of bloom-bright gorse-banks, divisional bounds all golden,
Into the glow of molten gold we gaze with eyes undazzled,
  And heady fume of this candescence, still undrunken, breathe.

page 8

Now is the year’s prize, and slow guerdon of tilth;
  Now is replenishment of fine young lambs and calves,
Brown-burnished heifers and new white lambs that frisk
  Beside the yellow shield of furze on verdant ground at large;
    And all is pavilioned with sheer celestial azure
    Hazing the far alps, their turquoise and silver;
    And: Life, life, resurgent life! Sings the exalted skylark,
  As on the battlements of spring he mounts his joyous guard.

Hereunto the seafaring forefathers were come;
Unknowing, to this dower were we brought from warding womb;
Even to this earth-response, farms, and teeming plain,
Terrestrial stress, recurrent fields, service of sun and rain.
  There is no more richness, no riper consummation
Of terrene fate than this conjunction with earth-form,
  Search you the wide seas, or fly the empyrean,
Unresting spirits; unto earth the earth-born
Must return, as spiring lark nestles to sod again.