Now where the bare sky spans the landscape bare, <br />Up long brown fallows creeps the slow brown team, <br />Scattering the seed-corn that must sleep and dream, <br />Till by Spring's carillon awakened there. <br />Ruffling the tangles of his thicket hair, <br />The stripling yokel steadies now the beam, <br />Now strides erect with cheeks that glow and gleam, <br />And whistles shrewdly to the spacious air. <br />Lured onward to the distance dim and blear, <br />The road crawls weary of the travelled miles: <br />The kine stand cowering in unmoving files; <br />The shrewmouse rustles through the bracken sere; <br />And, in the sculptured woodland's leafless aisles, <br />The robin chants the vespers of the year.<br /><br />Alfred Austin<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-wintry-picture/
