588 Gilbert passage. The dramatist also brings together 'furrow-weeds' and a grown crop: Cordelia. Alack! 'tis he: . . . Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, . . . Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn. A century send forth; Search every acre in the high-grown field. 2 An example of peculiar interest to a student of Keats is from Chapman's Iliad: There grew by this a field of corn, high, ripe, where reapers wrought, And let thick handfuls fall to earth, for which some other brought Bands, and made sheaves. Three binders stood, and took the handfuls reap'd From boys that gather'd quickly up, and by them armfuls heap'd. Amongst these at a furrow's end, the king stood pleased at heart. 8 One of the examples given by the Dictionary of furrow as meaning cornfield is from Milton: The labour'd oxe In his loose traces from the furrow came. 4 But* it seems as though this may also be taken in the primary sense of 'a narrow trench in the earth made by a plow'; Miss Lockwood so interprets it in her Lexicon to Milton. Another loose poetical use of the word occurs in Pope: He [the patriarch] from the wond'ring furrow called the food. 5 In 1735 William Somerville wrote, in describing a hunt: See how they thread The Brakes, and up yon Furrow drive along. 6 Somerville is writing of Autumn, and makes the word 'furrow' mean a cultivated field. After the time of Keats, Tennyson wrote : The lamb rejoiceth in the year, And raceth freely with his fere,
- King Lear 4. 4. 1-7.
3 Iliad 18.550-7. The word which Chapman renders 'furrow' also has the meaning of swath. I owe this reference to the kindness of Professor Leslie N. Broughton, one of the editors of the Concordance to Keats. 4 Comus29i-2.
- Essay on Man 3.219.
6 Chase 2.130.
