Walking in the flat Oxfordshire fields <br />Where the eye can find no rock to rest on but little flints <br />Speckle the soil, and the million-berried hedges <br />Tingle with birds at evening, I saw the sombre <br />November day redden and go down; a flight of lapwings <br />Whirled in the hollow of the field, and half-tame pheasants <br />Cried from the trees. I remembered impatiently <br />How the long bronze mountain of my own coast, <br />Where color is no account and pathos ridiculous, the sculpture is all, <br />Breaks the arrows of the setting sun <br />Over the enormous mounded eyeball of ocean. <br /> <br />The soft alien twilight <br />Worn and weak with too much humanity hooded my mind. <br />Poor flourishing earth, meek-smiling slave, <br />If sometime the swamps return and the heavy forest, black beech <br />and oak-roots <br />Break up the paving of London streets; <br />And only, as long before, on the lifted ridgeways <br />Few people shivering by little fires <br />Watch the night of the forest cover the land <br />And shiver to hear the wild dogs howling where the cities were, <br />Would you be glad to be free? I think you will never <br />Be glad again, so kneaded with human flesh, so humbled and changed. <br />Here all's down hill and passively goes to the grave, <br />Asks only a pinch of pleasure between the darknesses, <br />Contented to think that everything has been done <br />That's in the scope of the race: so should I also perhaps <br />Dream, under the empty angel of this twilight, <br />But the great memory of that unhumanized world, <br />With all its wave of good and evil to climb yet, <br />Its exorbitant power to match, its heartless passion to equal, <br />And all its music to make, beats on the grave-mound.<br /><br />Robinson Jeffers<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/subjected-earth/
