The Land by Vita Sackville-west

Author:Vita Sackville-west
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gardening, Poetry
Publisher: Phoemixx Classics Ebooks
Published: 2022-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

Who has not seen the spring, is blind, is dead.

Better for him that he should coffined lie,

And in that coin his toll to Nature pay

Than live a debtor. All things shall pass by

That fret his mind: the shift of policy,

Princes' ambition, wiser governance,

Civilisation's tides. There's dissonance

By our great necessary Babel bred,

Perplexes eager spirits unprepared,

Puts out their seeing eyes, leaves their blind touch

To grope past prejudice and ignorance

Towards solution, as they throw away

Each broken, each successive crutch.

Such truths as we have snared

Into the spread conspiracy of our nets,

Come to us fragmentary from a whole,

As meteorites from space. Now science sets

Two splintered ends together, makes one shred

Corroborate another; now live flesh

Persuades us by its drunken fallacy;

Now the instinctive soul

Takes its short-cut to grace; now blown by gust

Of hazard, truth's entangled in strange mesh,

Else how should poetry,

The runes of divination, superstition

Fastening sharp claw on common circumstance,

Even artifice as neat astrology

Twisting the very stars to fit man's ends,

Mingle some ore with dross of sorcery

Unless the fragment of the whole be part?

There's some relation we may not adjust,

Some concord of creation that the mind

Only in perilous balance apprehends,

Loth, fugitive, obscure.

All else dies in its season; all perplexities,

Even human grief with the human body dies,

Such griefs that press so wildly on the heart

As to crush in its shell. But still endure

Nature's renewal and man's fortitude,

A common thing, a permanent common thing,

So coarse, so stated, usual, and so rude,

So quiet in performance, and so slow

That hurrying wit outruns it. Yet with spring

Life leaps; her fountains flow;

And nimble foolish wit must humbled go.

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