Poems of Sidney Lanier / Sidney Lanier [electronic text]

CLOVER.

INSCRIBED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN KEATS.

DEAR uplands, Chester's favorable fields, My large unjealous Loves, many yet one— A grave good-morrow to your Graces, all, Fair tilth and fruitful seasons! Lo, how still! The midmorn empties you of men, save me; Speak to your lover, meadows! None can hear. I lie as lies yon placid Brandywine, Holding the hills and heavens in my heart For contemplation. 'Tis a perfect hour. From founts of dawn the fluent autumn day Has rippled as a brook right pleasantly Half-way to noon; but now with widening turn Makes pause, in lucent meditation locked, And rounds into a silver pool of morn, Bottom'd with clover-fields. My heart just hears Eight lingering strokes of some far village-bell, That speak the hour so inward-voiced, meseems Time's conscience has but whispered him eight hints Of revolution. Reigns that mild surcease That stills the middle of each rural morn— When nimble noises that with sunrise ran About the farms have sunk again to rest; When Tom no more across the horse-lot calls To sleepy Dick, nor Dick husk-voiced upbraids The sway-back'd roan for stamping on his foot With sulphurous oath and kick in flank, what time The cart-chain clinks across the slanting shaft,

And, kitchenward, the rattling bucket plumps Souse down the well, where quivering ducks quack loud, And Susan Cook is singing. Up the sky The hesitating moon slow trembles on, Faint as a new-washed soul but lately up From out a buried body. Far about, A hundred slopes in hundred fantasies Most ravishingly run, so smooth of curve That I but seem to see the fluent plain Rise toward a rain of clover-blooms, as lakes Pout gentle mounds of plashment up to meet Big shower-drops. Now the little winds, as bees, Bowing the blooms come wandering where I lie Mixt soul and body with the clover-tufts, Light on my spirit, give from wing and thigh Rich pollens and divine sweet irritants To every nerve, and freshly make report Of inmost Nature's secret autumn-thought Unto some soul of sense within my frame That owns each cognizance of the outlying five, And sees, hears, tastes, smells, touches, all in one.

Tell me, dear Clover (since my soul is thine, Since I am fain give study all the day, To make thy ways my ways, thy service mine, To seek me out thy God, my God to be, And die from out myself to live in thee)— Now, Cousin Clover, tell me in mine ear: Go'st thou to market with thy pink and green? Of what avail, this color and this grace? Wert thou but squat of stem and brindle-brown, Still careless herds would feed. A poet, thou: What worth, what worth, the whole of all thine art? Three-Leaves, instruct me! I am sick of price.

Framed in the arching of two clover-stems Where-through I gaze from off my hill, afar, The spacious fields from me to Heaven take on Tremors of change and new significance To th' eye, as to the ear a simple tale Begins to hint a parable's sense beneath. The prospect widens, cuts all bounds of blue Where horizontal limits bend, and spreads Into a curious-hill'd and curious-valley'd Vast, Endless before, behind, around; which seems Th' incalculable Up-and-Down of Time Made plain before mine eyes. The clover-stems Still cover all the space; but now they bear, For clover-blooms, fair, stately heads of men With poets' faces heartsome, dear and pale— Sweet visages of all the souls of time Whose loving service to the world has been In the artist's way expressed and bodied. Oh, In arms' reach, here be Dante, Keats, Chopin, Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo, Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach, And Buddha (sweetest masters! Let me lay These arms this once, this humble once, about Your reverend necks—the most containing clasp, For all in all, this world e'er saw!) and there, Yet further on, bright throngs unnamable Of workers worshipful, nobilities In the Court of Gentle Service, silent men, Dwellers in woods, brooders on helpful art, And all the press of them, the fair, the large, That wrought with beauty. Lo, what bulk is here? Now comes the Course-of-things, shaped like an Ox, Slow browsing, o'er my hillside, ponderously— The huge-brawned, tame, and workful Course-of-things,

That hath his grass, if earth be round or flat, And hath his grass, if empires plunge in pain Or faiths flash out. This cool, unasking Ox Comes browsing o'er my hills and vales of Time, And thrusts me out his tongue, and curls it, sharp, And sicklewise, about my poets' heads, And twists them in, all—Dante, Keats, Chopin, Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo, Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach, And Buddha, in one sheaf—and champs and chews, With slantly-churning jaws, and swallows down; Then slowly plants a mighty forefoot out, And makes advance to futureward, one inch. So: they have played their part. And to this end? This, God? This, troublous-breeding Earth? This, Sun Of hot, quick pains? To this no-end that ends, These Masters wrought, and wept, and sweated blood, And burned, and loved, and ached with public shame, And found no friends to breathe their loves to, save Woods and wet pillows? This was all? This Ox? "Nay," quoth a sum of voices in mine ear, "God's clover, we, and feed His Course-of-things; The pasture is God's pasture; systems strange Of food and fiberment He hath, whereby The general brawn is built for plans of His To quality precise. Kinsman, learn this: The artist's market is the heart of man; The artist's price, some little good of man. Tease not thy vision with vain search for ends. The End of Means is art that works by love. The End of Ends . . . in God's Beginning's lost."

WEST CHESTER, PA., Summer of 1876.