Classic Poem

The Sun in his wheeling flight looks down on a myriad farms.
Behold the farmer awake and beginning his manifold duties.
Winter and summer alike he must build the fire in the stove;
The pungent-smelling pine is kindled; the maple burns with merry crackling.
Then to the barn he goes; he shakes down the spicy hay;
He gives the horses their grain; the chains clank on the stanchions.
There is a musical ring from the milk-pail, as the white milk foams from the udders.
When he brings the rich warm milk to the house the hearty breakfast is ready.
Then through the dewy field he proceeds to the plowing,
Turning the deep dark soil in long and parallel furrows;
Or in the season he mounts his well-oiled mowing-machine
And with monotonous rattling sweeps through the clover-red meadow,
Laying low the tall grass which billows as the breeze sweeps over it,
Scaring the meadow-lark or the sweet-voiced voluble bobolink.
The sunrise hears the musical duet of the scythe and the whetstone.
Soon the hay is teddered and dried and piled into white-capped haycocks,
That stand like the tents of a horde of Scythian dwarfs.
Next day with dread of the threat of the thunder-heads piling up in the west,
He and his sons and his hired man load the great broad-tired cart;
The little girls help tread it down and laugh and shout in their glee.
The deep bays of the barn are stuft with the aromatic timothy.
So fall the corn and the other grain — the oats and the barley,
Either by sickle in hand or by swift-cutting reaper.
The tall stalks are garnered from the hills so carefully filled and weeded:
The full ripe ears are husked and piled on the barn-floor;
In the olden days with the merry festival of the husking-bee,
When all the neighbors came to help and the red ear had its significance,
Shown by the stifled cry and the stolen kiss and the shouts of rollicking laughter,
And the supper and dance at the end and the moonlight walk home,
Those were " the good old times, " on the dear home-farms — how many of them deserted!

The prodigious pumpkins which had grown scarce-noticed between the rows
Heaped up glow in the autumn sun, red and orange; one of them
Stands proudly apart, sure to win the prize at the County Fair.

The hens wait to be fed; with a rush and flapping of wings
They follow the farmer's wife to the yard and cluck as she scatters the seed.

To-day the potatoes are dug; they lie like eggs in a nest,
Six or ten in each hill, brown and big and earth-stained;
They must be harvested too and carefully nailed up in barrels.

All this produce, the manifold fruit of sown seeds,
To-morrow goes to the railway and is borne to the great city markets.

Winter comes and the woodland lot must be thinned out.
All day ring the strokes of the ax in the sharp frosty air;
There's a cracking of white gashed boles and a crashing of branches;
The logs are split with wedges and stacked in long measured rows,

Cord upon cord — the golden-barked birch, the rock-maple, the black shagbark hickory.
This wealth of wood must be piled on wide-shoed sledges
And dragged by the slow big-eyed oxen down the creaking deep-rutted snow-road.

In March, as the days grow longer and in the morning the crust
Formed on the dwindling heaps of snow will bear the weight of a man,
The maples on the hill-slope must be tapped and the sweet sap collected:
It drops from the wooden spiles and fills the shining pail;
It is poured into the great iron boiler and reduced into amber syrup.

In the long winter evenings or in summer's opaline twilight
Contented the farmer sits by the fire, or on the porch overlooking the valley,
And reviews the work of the day and plans for the morrow's campaign.

These are the scenes that the sun and the stars look down on in ten thousand New England farms,
Which in the Puritan days were stript of the timber,
Laboriously freed of the barkless stumps which were lined into grotesque fences,
Cleared of the boulders and rocks that were dropt by the Ice-age glaciers,
And now are heaped into boundary walls spotted with green-gray lichens,
Overgrown with blackberry vines and wild roses and scarlet pagodaed sumach.