New Poems And Variant Readings

FRAGMENTS 123
<%
O turned to friendly arts with all your will, That keep a little chapel sacred still, One rood of Holy-land in this bleak earth Sequestered still (our homage surely due!) To the twin Gods of mirthful wine and mirth.
About my fields, in the broad sun And blaze of noon, there goeth one, Barefoot and robed in blue, to scan With the hard eye of the husbandman My harvests and my cattle. Her, When even puts the birds astir And day has set in the great woods, We seek, among her garden roods. With bells and cries in vain : the while Lamps, plate, and the decanter smile On the forgotten board. But she, Deaf, blind, and prone on face and knee, Forgets time, family, and feast, And digs like a demented beast.
Tall as a guardsman, pale as the east at dawn, Who strides in strange apparel on the lawn ? Rails for his breakfast ? routs his vassals out (Like boys escaped from school) with song and shout ?