The Land E-Book

Vita Sackville-West

• Herausgeber: Phoemixx Classics Ebooks
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 89

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The Land Vita Sackville-West - Vita Sackville-West was born on March 9, 1892. The illegitimate daughter of a baron and a Spanish dancer, she grew up with money but few friends. She adored writing poetry from an early age. She grew up both in England and France.Vita realized quickly that she adored both men and women. She had a wide range of suitors, but she preferred enjoying life on her own terms. At 21 she married Harold Nicholson, a near-penniless diplomat, but he was a good match for her. Both were bisexual and both enjoyed relationships with the others blessings.For a period of time Vita dressed as a man and travelled with one of her lovers, Violet Keppel. In 1925, Vita became involved with famous author Virginia Woolf the two became each others muse. Vita was the inspiration for Woolfs novel Orlando.

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Vita Sackville-West

The Land

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WINTER

Nec sum animi dubius, verbis ea vincere magnum quam sit et angustis hunc addere rebus honorem.Georgics, Book III, 289-90

WINTER

I sing the cycle of my country's year, I sing the tillage, and the reaping sing, Classic monotony, that modes and wars Leave undisturbed, unbettered, for their best Was born immediate, of expediency. The sickle sought no art; the axe, the share Draped no superfluous beauty round their steel; The scythe desired no music for her stroke, Her stroke sufficed in music, as her blade Laid low the swathes; the scythesmen swept, nor cared What crop had ripened, whether oats in Greece Or oats in Kent; the shepherd on the ridge Like his Boeotian forebear kept his flocks, And still their outlines on our tenderer sky Simple and classic rear their grave design As once at Thebes, as once in Lombardy.

I sing once more The mild continuous epic of the soil, Haysel and harvest, tilth and husbandry; I tell of marl and dung, and of the means That break the unkindly spirit of the clay; I tell the things I know, the things I knew Before I knew them, immemorially; And as the fieldsman of unhurrying tread Trudges with steady and unchanging gait, Being born to clays that in the winter hold, So my pedestrian measure gravely plods, Telling a loutish life. I have refused The easier uses of made poetry, But no small ploy disdain to chronicle, And (like that pious yeoman laid to rest Beneath the legend that told all his life In five hard words: "He tilled the soil well") Prune my ambition to the lowly prayer That I may drive the furrow of my tale Straight, through the lives and dignities I know.

Why should a poet pray thus? poets scorn The boundaried love of country, being free Of winds, and alien lands, and distances, Vagabonds of the compass, wayfarers, Pilgrims of thought, the tongues of Pentecost Their privilege, and in their peddler's pack The curious treasures of their stock-in-trade, Bossy and singular, the heritage Of poetry and science, polished bright, Thin with the rubbing of too many hands: Myth, glamour, hazard, fables dim as age, Faith, doubt, perplexity, grief, hope, despair, Wings, and great waters, and Promethean fire, Man's hand to clasp, and Helen's mouth to kiss Why then in little meadows hedge about A poet's pasture? shed a poet's cloak For fustian? cede a birthright, thus to map So small a corner of so great a world?

The country habit has me by the heart, For he's bewitched forever who has seen, Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun, As each man knows the life that fits him best, The shape it makes in his soul, the tune, the tone, And after ranging on a tentative flight Stoops like the merlin to the constant lure. The country habit has me by the heart. I never hear the sheep-bells in the fold, Nor see the ungainly heron rise and flap Over the marsh, nor hear the asprous corn Clash, as the reapers set the sheaves in shocks (That like a tented army dream away The night beneath the moon in silvered fields), Nor watch the stubborn team of horse and man Graven upon the skyline, nor regain The sign-posts on the roads towards my home Bearing familiar names—without a strong Leaping of recognition; only here Lies peace after uneasy truancy; Here meet and marry many harmonies, —All harmonies being ultimately one,— Small mirroring majestic; for as earth Rolls on her journey, so her little fields Ripen or sleep, and the necessities Of seasons match the planetary law. So truly stride between the earth and heaven Sowers of grain: so truly in the spring Earth's orbit swings both blood and sap to rhythm, And infinite and humble are at one; So the brown hedger, through the evening lanes Homeward returning, sees above the ricks, Sickle in hand, the sickle in the sky.

Shepherds and stars are quiet with the hills. There is a bond between the men who go From youth about the business of the earth, And the earth they serve, their cradle and their grave; Stars with the seasons alter; only he Who wakeful follows the pricked revolving sky, Turns concordant with the earth while others sleep; To him the dawn is punctual; to him The quarters of the year no empty name. A loutish life, but in the midst of dark Cut to a gash of beauty, as when the hawk Bears upwards in its talons the striking snake, High, and yet higher, till those two hang close, Sculptural on the blue, together twined, Exalted, deathly, silent, and alone.

And since to live men labour, only knowing Life's little lantern between dark and dark, The fieldsman in his grave humility Goes about his centennial concerns, Bread for his race and fodder for his kine, Mating and breeding, since he only knows The life he sees, how it may best endure, (But on his Sabbath pacifies his God, Blindly, though storm may wreck his urgent crops,) And sees no beauty in his horny life, With closer wisdom than soft poets use. But I, like him, who strive Closely with earth, and know her grudging mind, Will sing no songs of bounty, for I see Only the battle between man and earth, The sweat, the weariness, the care, the balk; See earth the slave and tyrant, mutinous, Turning upon her tyrant and her slave, Yielding reluctantly her fruits, to none But most peremptory wooers. Wherever waste eludes man's vigilance, There spring the weeds and darnels; where he treads Through woods a tangle nets and trips his steps; His hands alone force fruitfulness and tilth; Strange lovers, man and earth! their love and hate Braided in mutual need; and of their strife A tired contentment born.

I then, who as a wrestler wrought with earth, Bending some stubborn acres to my will, Know that no miracle shall come to pass Informing man, no whisper from Demeter,— Miraculous strength, initiated lore. Nothing but toil shall serve him; in their rote The seasons shall compel his constancy, (The fields not always fair, nor prospects kind,) Year ripen year, and timely foresight yield Its measure in due course. And so I sing Without illusion, seeing fieldsmen go Heads lowered against sleet, hands frozen red, Without complaint, but only patient, patient: So in December sing I, while they come Weary and dull and silent, tramping home Through rainy dark, the cowman taking down The hurricane lantern from its usual peg, And going round the cattle in the stalls, The shifting, munching cattle in the dark And aromatic stalls beneath the rafters, Swinging the lantern as he goes his rounds. Clapping the kine upon their bony rumps And seeing to their comfort ere he comes Back to the ruddy kitchen for his food, —Thus sing in winter, watching by the fire:

Winter Song

Many have sung the summer's songs, Many have sung the corn, Many have sung white blossom too That stars the naked thorn— That stars the black and naked thorn Against the chalky blue.

But I, crouched up beside the hearth, Will sing the red and gray; Red going-down of sun behind Clubbed woods of winter's day; Of winter's short and hodden day That seals the sober hind:

Seals him sagacious through the year Since winter comes again: Since harvest's but another toil And sorrow through the grain Mounts up, through swathes of ripest grain The sorrow of the soil.

No lightness is there at their heart, No joy in country folk; Only a patience slow and grave Beneath their labour's yoke,— Beneath the earth's compelling yoke That only serves its slave.

Since countryman forever holds The winter's memory. When he, before the planets' fires Have faded from the sky, From black, resplendent winter sky Must go about his byres;

And whether to the reaper's whirr That scythes the falling crops, He travels round the widening wake Between the corn and copse, The stubble wake 'twixt corn and copse Where gleaners ply the rake,

Or whether in his granary loft He pours the winnowed sacks, Or whether in his yard he routs The vermin from the stacks, The vermin from the staddled stacks With staves and stones and shouts,

Still, still through all the molten eves Whether he reaps or hones, Or counts the guerdon of his sweat, Still to his inward bones, His ancient, sage, sardonic bones, The winter haunts him yet.

Winter and toil reward him still While he his course shall go According to his proven worth, Until his faith shall know The ultimate justice, and the slow Compassion of the earth.

Andredsweald

Hear first of the country that shall claim my theme, The Weald of Kent, once forest, and to-day Meadow and orchard, garden of fruit and hops, A green, wet country on a bed of clay, From Edenbridge to Appledore and Lympne Drained by the Medway and the Rother stream, With forest oaks still hearty in the copse, For this was Sylva Anderida. Here Stretched Andredsweald, and joined the wood of Blean, Forest and warren, cropped by herds of deer, And droves of swine that stirred the oak-trees' mast, So wild a tract, so darkly green, No stranger might forsake the trodden way, Or venture through the trees towards the dene, But on his horn must blow a warning blast; No stranger, under Ina's law, might burn the tree, And send the flame to sear the leaf; If so he did, he must pay grudgingly The fullest fine, for fire's a silent thief; But if he took an axe to fell the oak,

Even several oaks, as many as might be, Then must he pay for three, not more than three, For axe is an informer, not a thief, And at the felling loud in protest spoke.

This was the Weald, compact of forest laws, Pannage and Gavelswine, Danger and Corredy; Unhandseled, separate, dark; Where herdsman, seeking through the sunless days For berry and for nut, Shaggy with skins and hung with scarlet haws, While hogs between the trees went grunting ways, Lived a brute's life with brutes, and scored the bark To blaze the track that led him to his hut. This was the Weald, but as man conquers slow Each province of his fief,—poor simple land Or ravelled knowledge,—so the tardy herd, Waking to action, by impatience stirred, Bethought him he might throw Trees round his hovel, clearings make by hand, And in the sunlight let his children go.

So grew the dene. Next came the wooden plough, Turning the furrows of the first bold field, A patch of light, a square of paler green, Cupped in the darkness of the Weald.