+to T. F. Powys+
Out of the land
He grew as grows the weed,
But had no land
For his own need.
He to a farmer
His crafty sinews hired,
Rising up early
And going home tired
For six days of the week--
Poor Tom!--and said on Sunday,
Leaning over a gate:
‘To-morrow be Monday.’
Few were his thoughts,
Devious, and unexpressed;
Yet one strong yearning
Swelled in his breast
Through rain and shine,
Through months of earthly labour;
Till at last he spoke
His thought to a neighbour.
‘I should like well
To have some land of my own,
To be my land
And mine alone:
‘Say, half an acre--
More would outdo my means--
To grow potatoes
And a few beans.’
Up at the Inn
His neighbour made it known
How Tom wished
For land of his own.
About the village
To all men’s ears it ran;
The farmer heard it,
Who was a rich man.
Green water-meadows,
Large barns, deep fields he had;
His servant’s wish
Made his heart glad,
For he in plenty
Was rooted like an oak;
And Tom’s half-acre
Seemed a good joke.
He gave the ground.
And all men said of him
He could well afford
To have his whim.
The plot of ground which the farmer gave
Did not cost him dear.
All unfenced and untilled it lay,
And far away
From cottage and inland tree;
Where the rolling down rears up like a great slow wave
And then falls sheer
Four hundred feet to the sea.
Thither poor Tom,
His day’s toil over, would walk;
And marked, and swaled,
And scratched on the chalk--
Too much intent
To note the oncome of night
Till to ease his back
He stood upright.
And plodding homeward
Through nurtured fields, his mind
Still delved in the patch
He had left behind.
Sea-winds blew there,
Sea-birds flew there,
Nothing grew there
Save the inherent tares of barren ground;
Grasses shrivelled and stiff,
And frantic thistles scattering their seed.
Claw-rooted was each necessitous weed
And salt to the taste,
For the blown rack groped over the waste,
And evermore the sea with a trampling sound
Beleaguered the cliff.
A row of beans
Was the first thing Tom set.
Most died: the rest
The rabbits ate.
He gave up beer
And saved to buy a fence.
His wife blamed him
For having no sense;
And all his friends
That saw him study and grieve--
Landless themselves--
Laughed in their sleeve.
Tom heard them out;
He did not say them Nay,
But still to his patch
Went day by day,
Disheartened, perhaps,
But redeless to forgo
The dogged dream
He had cherished so.
And little thought
His straitened brain-pan knew
Save only that
There was much to do.
From the beginning
The weeds had been his bane,
And tilling the ground
Made them as bad again.
He groaned aloud
To see how they would thrive
Where nothing he planted
Could keep alive;
And fresh weeds grew
That had not grown before;
For each he spudded
There sprang ten more,
That bloomed in his face
As if from very spite.
It chanced, such a blossom
Caught his sight
Just as he struck work.
His back was aching so
That he was half-minded
To let it go,
But from long habit,
With look indifferent,
Above the invader
Wearily he bent
To root it up:
His face by slow degrees
Awakened,
He went on his knees--
There is no beauty like the beauty of the wild,
That blossoms suddenly out of the bare hillside.
It is the barren woman that goes with child,
It is the clenched knot of necessity untied,
Eternity waylaid, and labouring creation
Into forgetfulness and laughter beguiled:
A relenting, a reconciliation, a glimpse of the bride,
Nature, hidden under her dark veils of Time and Space and Causation.
Out of the hillside a word:
‘Lo, here I am! Quick, gather my secret, cried--
Had you not come--to the waste, from pole to pole
To echo forever unheard. Had I died, had I died,
Perished had with me, unguessed, the clue of the whole.
But now are the heavens opened, and Salvation
Is sprung up like a flower cut of the earth.
Look! I am newly-made, the dew of my birth
Is of the womb of the morning; I hold in my wide-
open petals the epitome of that blue
In seas drowned, in distance secluded, in air enskied:
And all, all is for you.
Come! Kneel beside me and unlearn your soul.’
Ah, not for man the message, the revelation!
On hillsides desolate and bare, by paths untravelled,
In swamps, and skyey wastes the tokens are spilled.
Wild beauty like a bird flits here and there,
Homes not to hand nor snare, and nowhere settles.
Who’s he shall augur from her flight? And who shall dare
Unravel the plain speech of five blue petals?
Not man’s mind, that chooseth a good
Obsequious to the God his proud heart hath chosen,
That parteth light from darkness and right from wrong,
Nor brooketh the unfulfilled.
Let him tread out the blossom and ignore the song
And go upon his way.
But some there are who hearken, who stay,
Who kneel and worship before the undesigned,
And all their strength relinquish to obey
A voice that seeks not to be understood--
No, nor yet purpose has enough to be a mock.
Awhile they feed on brightness; but ere long
They find their hearts astray, and their blood frozen,
And know themselves averted from their kind.
Extremity of light has made them blind.
With look so vacant as to seem serene,
They wander towards darkness, and as they go
Idly a few belated berries glean,
Or darnel and the clammy nightshade wreathe,
Or to themselves speak low;
And in the end lie down upon the rock,
And to the heedless air their last loud groan bequeath.
Darkness rose up out of the deep;
Headland by headland along the coast
Lost colour, shape, identity, stole from sight,
Folded in darkness like a flock of sheep.
Up on the height
The flower ebbed from his vision like a ghost,
And Tom went home to sleep.
Changed henceforward was his mood.
All he’d endeavoured, all he’d planned
Forgetting, his mind at ease, he would sit awhile
To watch the gulls, or stretched full-length would brood;
And camomile,
Chance-plucked, chafed for its savour in his hand,
And thyme or fennel chewed.
Mildly now he could behold
Thistle and coney flourish unchecked.
The unequal combat relinquishing he let fall
His spade, or only dug to smell the mould;
But joys past all
Former surmise he harvested from neglect,
That joyed nor reaped of old.
Sweetness had pierced him like a dart.
Careless of duty, afield he ranged,
And spared with fostering hand the weeds amid
The farmer’s crops, such wonder was in his heart.
The farmer chid--
And swore the politicians were deranged
To take the labourer’s part.
Christmas came, and quarter-day;
‘Goodwill to all men’ chanted the choir,
‘And on earth, peace.’ The earth in a riveted black
Frost fast bound like a cataleptic lay.
The times were slack.
The farmer said to Tom: ‘I don’t require
Servants not worth their pay.’
Household shipwreck disposing as best
He could, since none near by would employ
Such a half-wit, on a tramp for work he set out;
Of more than land and livelihood dispossessed,
For care and doubt
Sat plotting deep in his heart that his secret joy
Might vade with all the rest.
Everywhere rejected, he turned
Onward by darkening ways and grim
Gaunt woodlands where yet would kindle from bough to bough
The irresistible wildfire of spring for which he had yearned.
Small difference now
’Twixt leaves unborn or dead underfoot to him
Whom spring no more concerned.
Lengthening days would but strengthen his care,
Nor spring be even what once it had been--
A dazzle in dull eyes, chance heart-thrust of a bird’s song,
Hint of a covenanted joy all creatures share;
For he too long
Had watched a wildflower’s visage, and had seen
No hope, no purpose there.
Whither he went,
And what the welcome he found,
Or if he yet
Were above ground,
Came never word.
His name was clean forgot;
Unless folk said
Tom was a bad lot.
Many years after,
His tale was told to me.
I for a whim
Went off to see
Tom’s patch, but might
Have sought in vain for it
Had not my foot
Caught in a bit
Of galvanised netting--
Good heartless shop-stuff, wrought
To outlast man
And man’s thought.
I gave it a kick;
And after one more look,
Moved off to find
Some sheltered nook
Where I might sit
And watch the seagulls fly.
All that afternoon
No one came by,
Save one old man
Scarcely more human than they--
And he, I think,
Had lost his way.
For as he went
He’d stop and look about,
And shake his head,
As if in doubt
Of where he was;
And once, as though he’d read
The answer there,
Pulled up a weed
And peered at it
Full steadfastly--and then
Throwing it down,
Limped on again.