Haymaking

AFTER night's thunder far away had rolledThe fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,Like the first gods before they made the worldAnd misery, swimming the stormless seaIn beauty and in divine gaiety.The smooth white empty road was lightly strewnWith leaves--the holly's Autumn falls in June--And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat.The mill-foot water tumbled white and litWith tossing crystals, happier than any crowdOf children pouring out of school aloud.And in the little thickets where a sleeperFor ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeperAnd garden warbler sang unceasingly;While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce gleeThe swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrowAs if the bow had flown off with the arrow.Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mownTravelled the road. In the field sloping down,Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsookOut in the sun; and the long waggon stoodWithout its team, it seemed it never wouldMove from the shadow of that single yew.The team, as still, until their task was due,Beside the labourers enjoyed the shadeThat three squat oaks mid-field together madeUpon a circle of grass and weed uncut,And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, butNow brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean.The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,But still. And all were silent. All was old,This morning time, with a great age untold,Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,Than, at the field's far edge, the farmer's home,A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.Under the heavens that know not what years beThe men, the beasts, the trees, the implementsUttered even what they will in times far hence--All of us gone out of the reach of change--Immortal in a picture of an old grange.