Did poems with mr whitby today. It was kind of hard in the beginning...but..interesting...
Two poems...[The Serf] by Roy Campbell and [Aside] by R.S Thomas...their subject matter is famers...exploring the idea of the suffering of farmers, depriving of a choice, forced to submit to oppression and wait in patience...
The Serf
by Roy Campbell (1901-57)
His naked skin clothed in the torrid mist
That puffs in smoke around the patient hooves,
The ploughman drives, a slow somnambulist,
And through the green his crimson furrow grooves.
His heart, more deeply than he wounds the plain,
Long by the rasping share of insult torn,
Red clod, to which the war-cry once was rain
And tribal spears the fatal sheaves of corn,
Lies fallow now. But as the turf divides
I see in the slow progress of his strides
Over the toppled clods and falling flowers,
The timeless, surly patience of the serf
That moves the nearest to the naked earth
And ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers.
[28 July 1926]
Aside
by R.S.Thomas
Take heart, Prytherch.
Over you the planets stand,
And have seen more ills than your.
This canker was in the bone
Before man bent to his image
In the pool's glass. Violence has been
And will be again. Between better
And worse is no bad place
For a labourer, whose lot is to seem
Stationary in traffic so fast.
Turn aside, I said; do not turn back
There is no forward and no back
In the fields, only the year's two
Solstices, and patience between.
