The youth burning couch grass is as tired <br />As muscle has right to bear and keeps work on <br />The brown earth slopes from the potato field to the wired <br />Sheep enclosure; and hidden high and white the sun. <br /> <br />Brown the sense of things, the light smoke blows across <br />The field face, light blue wisps of sweet bitter reek <br />Dear to the Roman perhaps, so old seems the dross <br />Burning of root, grass, wheat, so near, easy to seek. <br /> <br />Old is the land a thousand generations <br />Have tilled there, sought with bright sweat the stuff of its bread <br />Here one comes for the sense of fine books, revelations <br />Of beauty in usually, found as well of heart as of head. <br /> <br />And all the tales of far Europe that come on one, <br />The sense of myriads tending the needings of life <br />And more to one than the near memory of battle gun <br />Peace with its sorrow blots out the agonie's of strife.<br /><br />Ivor Gurney<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/brown-earth-look/
