New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1914-09-27
AUGUST, 1914
BY JOHN MASEFIELD

How still this quiet cornield is tonight;
BY an ntenser glow the evening falls,
Bringing, not darkness, but deeper light;
Among the stocks partridge covey calls
The windows glitter on the distant hill;
Beyond the hedge the sheep-bells in the fold
Stumble on sudden music and are still;
The forlorn pinewoods droop above the void;
An endless quiet valley reaches out
Past the blue hills into the evening sky;
Over the stubble cawng, goes a rout
OF rocks from harvest, Tagging as they ny
So beautiful it is I never saw
So great a beauty on these English fields
Touched, by the twilight's coming, into ave,
Ripe to the soul and rich with summers yields.
These homes, this valley spread below me here,
The rocks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen,
Have been the heartfelt things, past-speakng dear
To unknown generations Of dead men,
Who, century after century, held these farms,
And, looking out to watch the changing sky,
Heard. as we hear, the rumors and alarms
OF war at hand and danger pressing nigh,
And knew, as we know, that the message meant
The breakng-of of ties, the loss of friends,
Death like a miser getting in his rent
And no new stones laid where the trackway ends.
The harvest not yet won, the empty bin,
The friendly horses taken from the stalls,
The falow on the hill not yet brought in.
The cracks upholstered in the leaking walls;
Yet heard the news and went discouraged home,
And brOOdCQ Dy the nTe WIN neHFy UulHug
With such dumb loving of the Berkshire loan
As breaks the dumb hearts Of the English kind
Then sadly rose and left the welI-loved Downs
And so, by ship to sea, and knew no more
The fields of home, the byres, the market towns,
Nor the dear outline Of the English shore,
But knew the misery of the soaking trench,
The freezing in the rigging, the despair
In the revolving second of the wrench
When the blind soul is flung upon the air,
And died (uucouthly mosD in foreign lands
For some idea but dimly understood
OF an English city never built by hands,
Which love of England prompted and made good.
If there be any life beyond the grave
il must be near the men and things we love.
Some power of quick suggestion how to save
Touching the living soul from above,
An influence from the Earth from those dead hearts
SO passionate once deep, so truly kind,
That in the living child the spirit starts
Feeling companioned still, not left behind.
Surely above these fields spirit broods,
sense CT many watchers muttering near,
Of the lone Downland with the forlorn woods
Loved to the DEATH inestimably dear.
A muttering from beyond the wells of Death
From long dead men, to whom this quiet scene
Came among binding tears with the last breath,
The dying soldiers vision Of his queen
All the unspoken worship of those lives
Spent in forgotten wars at other calls
Glimmers upon these fields where evening drives
Beauty like breath gently darkness falls.
Darkness that makes the meadows holier STILL
The elm trees ssdden in the hedge, sigh
Moves in the beech -cump or the haunted Mill,
The rising planets deepen in the sky,
And silence broods like spirit on the brae
A glimmCry moon begins, the moonlight runs
Oyer the grasses of the ancient way,
Rutted this morning by the passing guns.
From The English Review.