ENIGMA

A man is in the fields, let us look with his eyes,
As the first clouds ripen with the sunrise,
At the earth around us, marking the nameless flowers
That minister to him through the tedious hours
Of sweat and toil, their grave, half-human faces
Lifted in vain to greet him where he passes.
The wind ruffles the meadow, the tall clouds sail
Westward full-rigged, and darken with their shadow
The bright surface as a thought the mind.
The earth is beautiful, and he is blind
To it all, or notices only the weeds' way
Of wrestling with and choking the young hay
That pushes tentatively from the gaunt womb.
He cannot read the flower-printed book
Of nature, nor distinguish the small songs
The birds bring him, calling with wide bills,
Out of the leaves and over the bare hills;
The squealing curlew and the loud thrush
Are both identical, just birds, birds;
He blames them sullenly as the agreed,
Ancestral enemies of the live seed,
Unwilling to be paid by the rich crop
Of music swelling thickly to the hedge top.

Blind? Yes, and deaf, and dumb, and the last irks most,
For could he speak, would not the glib tongue boast
A lore denied our neoteric sense,
Being handed down from the age of innocence?
Or would the cracked lips, parted at last, disclose
The embryonic thought that never grows?