Not Greuze's ploughmen made insipid in
The melting colours of his pastorals,
So neatly dressed, so rosy, that one laughs
To see the sugared idyll chastening
The pastels of a Louis Quinze salon,
But dirty, gross, and bestial--as they are.
Penned round some market town in villages,
They know not them who traffic in the next,
But hold them enemies to cheat and rogue.
Their fatherland? Not one believes in it,
Except that it makes soldiers of their sons,
To steal their labour for a span of years.
What is the fatherland to yokels? They
See only, in a corner of their brains,
Vaguely, the king, magnificent man of gold,
In the braided velvet of his purple robes,
A sceptre, and gemmed crowns escutcheoning
The panelled walls of gilded palaces,
Guarded by sentinels with tasselled swords.
This do they know of power. It is enough.
And for the rest their heavy feet would march
In clogs through duty, liberty, and law.
In everything by instinct ankylosed,
A dirty almanac is all they read;
And though they hear the distant cities roaring,
So terrified are they by revolutions,
That they are riveted to serfdom's chains,
Fearing, if they should rear, the iron heel.
Along the black roads hollowed out with ruts,
Dung-heaps in front and cinder-heaps behind,
Stretch with low roofs and naked walls their huts
Under the buffeting wind and lashing rain.
These are their farms. And yonder soars the church,
Stained, to the north, with ooze of verdigris,
And farther, squared with ditches, lie their fields,
Fertile in patches, thanks to fat manure,
And to the harrow's unrelenting teeth.
There they keep tilling with their obstinate hands
The black glebe mined by moles, and rotten with
Detritus, pregnant with the autumn's sperm.
With dripping brow they drive the spade in deep,
Doubled above the furrows they must sow,
Under the hail of March that whips their back.
And in the summer, when the ripe rye rocks
With golden glints under the pouring sun,
Here, in the fire of long and torrid days,
Their restless sickle shaves the vast wheat-field,
While from their wrinkled foreheads runs the sweat,
Opening their skin from shoulders down to hips;
Noon darts its brazier rays upon their heads;
So raw the heat is that in meslin fields
The too dry ears burst open, and the beasts,
Their necks with gadflies riddled, pant in the sun.
And let November slow to die arrive,
Rolling his hectic rattle through deaf woods,
Howling his sobs and ending not his moans,
Until his death-knell sounds--still runs their sweat.
Always anew preparing future crops,
Under a sky spouting from swollen clouds,
While the north wind tears big holes in the woods,
And sweeps the broken stubble from the fields,
So that their bodies soon in ruin fall:
Let them be young and comely, broadly built,
Winter that chills, summer that calcines them,
Makes their limbs loathsome and their lungs short-breathed;
Or old, and bearing the down-weighing years,
With blear eyes, broken backs, and useless arms,
And horror stamped upon their hedgehog face,
They stagger under the ruin-loving wind.
And when Death opens unto them its doors;
Their coffin sliding into the soft earth
Seems only to contain a thing twice dead.