The espalier | Project Gutenberg

Out of the land

He grew as grows the weed,

But had no land

For his own need.

He to a farmer

His crafty sinews hired,

Rising up early

And going home tired

For six days of the week—

Poor Tom!—and said on Sunday,

Leaning over a gate:

‘To-morrow be Monday.’

Few were his thoughts,

Devious, and unexpressed;

Yet one strong yearning

Swelled in his breast

Through rain and shine,

Through months of earthly labour;

Till at last he spoke

His thought to a neighbour.

‘I should like well

To have some land of my own,

To be my land

And mine alone:

‘Say, half an acre—

More would outdo my means—

To grow potatoes

And a few beans.’

Up at the Inn

His neighbour made it known

How Tom wished

For land of his own.

About the village

To all men’s ears it ran;

The farmer heard it,

Who was a rich man.

Green water-meadows,

Large barns, deep fields he had;

His servant’s wish

Made his heart glad,

For he in plenty

Was rooted like an oak;

And Tom’s half-acre

Seemed a good joke.

He gave the ground.

And all men said of him

He could well afford

To have his whim.

The plot of ground which the farmer gave

Did not cost him dear.

All unfenced and untilled it lay,

And far away

From cottage and inland tree;

Where the rolling down rears up like a great slow wave

And then falls sheer

Four hundred feet to the sea.

Thither poor Tom,

His day’s toil over, would walk;

And marked, and swaled,

And scratched on the chalk—

Too much intent

To note the oncome of night

Till to ease his back

He stood upright.

And plodding homeward

Through nurtured fields, his mind

Still delved in the patch

He had left behind.

Sea-winds blew there,

Sea-birds flew there,

Nothing grew there

Save the inherent tares of barren ground;

Grasses shrivelled and stiff,

And frantic thistles scattering their seed.

Claw-rooted was each necessitous weed

And salt to the taste,

For the blown rack groped over the waste,

And evermore the sea with a trampling sound

Beleaguered the cliff.

A row of beans

Was the first thing Tom set.

Most died: the rest

The rabbits ate.

He gave up beer

And saved to buy a fence.

His wife blamed him

For having no sense;

And all his friends

That saw him study and grieve—

Landless themselves—

Laughed in their sleeve.

Tom heard them out;

He did not say them Nay,

But still to his patch

Went day by day,

Disheartened, perhaps,

But redeless to forgo

The dogged dream

He had cherished so.

And little thought

His straitened brain-pan knew

Save only that

There was much to do.

From the beginning

The weeds had been his bane,

And tilling the ground

Made them as bad again.

He groaned aloud

To see how they would thrive

Where nothing he planted

Could keep alive;

And fresh weeds grew

That had not grown before;

For each he spudded

There sprang ten more,

That bloomed in his face

As if from very spite.

It chanced, such a blossom

Caught his sight

Just as he struck work.

His back was aching so

That he was half-minded

To let it go,

But from long habit,

With look indifferent,

Above the invader

Wearily he bent

To root it up:

His face by slow degrees

Awakened,

He went on his knees—

There is no beauty like the beauty of the wild,

That blossoms suddenly out of the bare hillside.

It is the barren woman that goes with child,

It is the clenched knot of necessity untied,

Eternity waylaid, and labouring creation

Into forgetfulness and laughter beguiled:

A relenting, a reconciliation, a glimpse of the bride,

Nature, hidden under her dark veils of Time and Space and Causation.

Out of the hillside a word:

‘Lo, here I am! Quick, gather my secret, cried—

Had you not come—to the waste, from pole to pole

To echo forever unheard. Had I died, had I died,

Perished had with me, unguessed, the clue of the whole.

But now are the heavens opened, and Salvation

Is sprung up like a flower cut of the earth.

Look! I am newly-made, the dew of my birth

Is of the womb of the morning; I hold in my wide-

open petals the epitome of that blue

In seas drowned, in distance secluded, in air enskied:

And all, all is for you.

Come! Kneel beside me and unlearn your soul.’

Ah, not for man the message, the revelation!

On hillsides desolate and bare, by paths untravelled,

In swamps, and skyey wastes the tokens are spilled.

Wild beauty like a bird flits here and there,

Homes not to hand nor snare, and nowhere settles.

Who’s he shall augur from her flight? And who shall dare

Unravel the plain speech of five blue petals?

Not man’s mind, that chooseth a good

Obsequious to the God his proud heart hath chosen,

That parteth light from darkness and right from wrong,

Nor brooketh the unfulfilled.

Let him tread out the blossom and ignore the song

And go upon his way.

But some there are who hearken, who stay,

Who kneel and worship before the undesigned,

And all their strength relinquish to obey

A voice that seeks not to be understood—

No, nor yet purpose has enough to be a mock.

Awhile they feed on brightness; but ere long

They find their hearts astray, and their blood frozen,

And know themselves averted from their kind.

Extremity of light has made them blind.

With look so vacant as to seem serene,

They wander towards darkness, and as they go

Idly a few belated berries glean,

Or darnel and the clammy nightshade wreathe,

Or to themselves speak low;

And in the end lie down upon the rock,

And to the heedless air their last loud groan bequeath.

Darkness rose up out of the deep;

Headland by headland along the coast

Lost colour, shape, identity, stole from sight,

Folded in darkness like a flock of sheep.

Up on the height

The flower ebbed from his vision like a ghost,

And Tom went home to sleep.

Changed henceforward was his mood.

All he’d endeavoured, all he’d planned

Forgetting, his mind at ease, he would sit awhile

To watch the gulls, or stretched full-length would brood;

And camomile,

Chance-plucked, chafed for its savour in his hand,

And thyme or fennel chewed.

Mildly now he could behold

Thistle and coney flourish unchecked.

The unequal combat relinquishing he let fall

His spade, or only dug to smell the mould;

But joys past all

Former surmise he harvested from neglect,

That joyed nor reaped of old.

Sweetness had pierced him like a dart.

Careless of duty, afield he ranged,

And spared with fostering hand the weeds amid

The farmer’s crops, such wonder was in his heart.

The farmer chid—

And swore the politicians were deranged

To take the labourer’s part.

Christmas came, and quarter-day;

‘Goodwill to all men’ chanted the choir,

‘And on earth, peace.’ The earth in a riveted black

Frost fast bound like a cataleptic lay.

The times were slack.

The farmer said to Tom: ‘I don’t require

Servants not worth their pay.’

Household shipwreck disposing as best

He could, since none near by would employ

Such a half-wit, on a tramp for work he set out;

Of more than land and livelihood dispossessed,

For care and doubt

Sat plotting deep in his heart that his secret joy

Might vade with all the rest.

Everywhere rejected, he turned

Onward by darkening ways and grim

Gaunt woodlands where yet would kindle from bough to bough

The irresistible wildfire of spring for which he had yearned.

Small difference now

’Twixt leaves unborn or dead underfoot to him

Whom spring no more concerned.

Lengthening days would but strengthen his care,

Nor spring be even what once it had been—

A dazzle in dull eyes, chance heart-thrust of a bird’s song,

Hint of a covenanted joy all creatures share;

For he too long

Had watched a wildflower’s visage, and had seen

No hope, no purpose there.

Whither he went,

And what the welcome he found,

Or if he yet

Were above ground,

Came never word.

His name was clean forgot;

Unless folk said

Tom was a bad lot.

Many years after,

His tale was told to me.

I for a whim

Went off to see

Tom’s patch, but might

Have sought in vain for it

Had not my foot

Caught in a bit

Of galvanised netting—

Good heartless shop-stuff, wrought

To outlast man

And man’s thought.

I gave it a kick;

And after one more look,

Moved off to find

Some sheltered nook

Where I might sit

And watch the seagulls fly.

All that afternoon

No one came by,

Save one old man

Scarcely more human than they—

And he, I think,

Had lost his way.

For as he went

He’d stop and look about,

And shake his head,

As if in doubt

Of where he was;

And once, as though he’d read

The answer there,

Pulled up a weed

And peered at it

Full steadfastly—and then

Throwing it down,

Limped on again.

PEEPING TOM

Transcriber’s Notes