The 'Furrow' in Keats' Ode to Autumn 589 And answers to his mother's calls From the flower'd furrow. 7 He seems to mean not arable land, but pasture. Lastly, a book dealing with the agricultural laborer, by Christopher Holdenby, published in 1913, is called Folk of the Furrow. In the preceding examples, as in Keats, 'furrow' is singular. There is also a group of passages in which the word is used in the plural, and furrows are associated with grain or stubble. Ariosto describes how a fire, burning the dry stubble, 'scorre per gli solchi,' 8 and in telling of a flood represents it as destroying E i grass! solchi e le biade feconde." These and their context are rendered by Hoole as follows: In the open fields, or sunny meads, The brittle stubble and the spiky reeds Resist but little, when the wary hind Kindles the flame, to which the northern wind Gives double force, till wide around it preys And all the furrows crackle in the blaze. When the king of floods, with deepening roar, In sudden deluge bursts his sounding shore; Wide o'er the field his rushing tide is borne, The furrows drowns and sweeps the ripen'd corn, Spenser, whom Keats often imitated, copies Ariosto as follows: As he that strives to stop a suddein flood, And in strong banckes his violence enclose, Forceth it swell above his wonted mood, And largely overflow the fruitfull plaine, That all the countrey seemes to be a Maine, And the rich furrowes flote, all quite fordonne: The woefull husbandman doth lowd complaine, To see his whole yeares labour lost so soone, For which to God he made so many an idle boone. 10 7 Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind 158-60. It seems as^though this might properly be given in N.E.D. 8 Orlando Furioso 14.48.6 9 /&., 40.31.4. The use of the word in Hoole and Ariosto was brought to my notice by my pupil Miss Clara Crane. Sir Sidney Colvin states that Keats as studying Ariosto about the time when he composed To Autumn (John Keats, New York, 1917, p. 370).
> Faerie Queene 3.7.34.
