The Wisconsin weekly blade. [volume] (Madison, Wis.) 1916-1925, 1918-06-13
AUGUST 1914
From the English Review

(From the English Review
How still this quiet cornfed is tonight;
By an intenser glow the evening falls,
Bringing not darkness, but deeper light;
Among the stocks a partridge covey calls.
The windows glitter 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, cawing, goes rout
Of rocks from harvest, tagging they fly.
So beautiful it is / never saw
So great beauty these English fields
Touched by the twilights coming, into awe,
Ripe to the soul and rich with summers yields.
These homes, this valley spread below here,
The rocks the tilted stacks the beasts in pen,
Have been the heartfelt things, past-speaking 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 breaking-of of ties, the loss of friends,
Death like d 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 fallow on the hill not yet brought in,
The cracks upholstered in the leaking walls;
Yet heard the news, and went discouraged home
And brooded by the fire with heavy mind,
With such dumb loving of the Berkshire loan
As breaks the dumb hearts of the English kind
Then sadly rose and left the weoved 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 (uncouthly, most) 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
1t must be the and things we love-
Some power of quick suggestion how to
Touching the living soul from above
An influence from the earth from those dead hearts
SO passionate once, so deep, so truly kind
That in the living child the spirit starts
Feeling companoned still, not left behind.
Surely above these fields spirit broods
A sense of many watchers mutterng near,
Of the lone Downland with the fororn woods
Loved to the DEATH inestimably dear
muttering from beyond the wells of Death
From long dead men, to whom this quiet
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 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 sadden in the hedge, sigh
Moves in the beech-cump the haunted hill,
The rising planets deepen in the sky.
And silence broods like spirit on the brae;
glimmcry moon begins the moonlight runs
Over the grasses of the ancient way,
Rutted this morning by the passing guns.
JOHN MAsEFIEID.