Near and Far (Blunden)/Far East
Far East
Old hamlets with your fragrant flowers And honey for the bee,Your curtained taverns, chiming towers,Droning songs and twilight hours And nodding industry—
Fine fields, wide-lapped, whose loveliest-born Day's first bright cohort finds,And steals away; whose lustier cornThe red-faced churl invades at morn And proud as Cesar binds—
Uplands and groves that from the West Have the last word for me,Think not your image in my breastWas darkened when I sang my best Beside an Eastern sea.
Beside an Eastern sea the pines In tufty spinneys drowse,The firefly-grass beneath them shinesBlue-lanterned, and the chaliced vines Climb witch-like to the boughs;
And girdled green there bask the plains Where, with his timeless smiles, And mushroom-hat, brown Vigour gainsHis spindling roots, his haulms, his grains— The Oriental Giles.
He serves a god much like your own, Who, peeping from the rows,Brings gourds the greatest ever grown,And peerless pumpkins; smooths the down Of these fruits, lacquers those.
Thence the young child at home awaits, Bright-peering as a mouse,Her share of country delicates,And chatters bold to her young mates About the smoky house.
The bronze cicada twangs all day, And the silver-soft at nightCools the snake's thicket by the wayWhere heaps the sturdy disarray Of husbandry's delight.
In rural music bold or frail Contentment's anthem fills,And, roving the rude-ripened vale,If restless spirits sometime fail, Here too are heavenly hills.
Sleep's master-dream there Stands alone: The mount of East and West!The still hour come, his monstrous coneIs a timid flower this morning blown, Now folded like the rest.