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 heartFor contemplation.’Tis a perfect hour.From founts of dawn the fluent autumn dayHas rippled as a brook right pleasantlyHalf-way to noon; but now with widening turnMakes pause, in lucent meditation locked,And rounds into a silver pool of morn,Bottom’d with clover-fields. My heart just hearsEight lingering strokes of some far village-bell,That speak the hour so inward-voiced, meseemsTime’s conscience has but whispered him eight hintsOf revolution. Reigns that mild surceaseThat stills the middle of each rural morn—When nimble noises that with sunrise ranAbout the farms have sunk again to rest;When Tom no more across the horse-lot callsTo sleepy Dick, nor Dick husk-voiced upbraidsThe sway-back’d roan for stamping on his footWith sulphurous oath and kick in flank, what timeThe cart-chain clinks across the slanting shaft,And, kitchenward, the rattling bucket plumpsSouse down the well, where quivering ducks quack loud,And Susan Cook is singing.Up the skyThe hesitating moon slow trembles on,Faint as a new-washed soul but lately upFrom out a buried body. Far about,A hundred slopes in hundred fantasiesMost ravishingly run, so smooth of curveThat I but seem to see the fluent plainRise toward a rain of clover-blooms, as lakesPout gentle mounds of plashment up to meetBig shower-drops. Now the little winds, as bees,Bowing the blooms come wandering where I lieMixt soul and body with the clover-tufts,Light on my spirit, give from wing and thighRich pollens and divine sweet irritantsTo every nerve, and freshly make reportOf inmost Nature’s secret autumn-thoughtUnto some soul of sense within my frameThat 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-stemsWhere-through I gaze from off my hill, afar,The spacious fields from me to Heaven take onTremors of change and new significanceTo th’ eye, as to the ear a simple taleBegins to hint a parable’s sense beneath.The prospect widens, cuts all bounds of blueWhere horizontal limits bend, and spreadsInto a curious-hill’d and curious-valley’d Vast,Endless before, behind, around; which seemsTh’ incalculable Up-and-Down of TimeMade plain before mine eyes. The clover-stemsStill cover all the space; but now they bear,For clover-blooms, fair, stately heads of menWith poets’ faces heartsome, dear and pale—Sweet visages of all the souls of timeWhose loving service to the world has beenIn 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 layThese arms this once, this humble once, aboutYour reverend necks—the most containing clasp,For all in all, this world e’er saw!) and there,Yet further on, bright throngs unnamableOf workers worshipful, nobilitiesIn 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 painOr faiths flash out. This cool, unasking OxComes 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, SunOf 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, saveWoods 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 strangeOf food and fiberment He hath, wherebyThe general brawn is built for plans of HisTo 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.