Classic Poem

So here I have by happy chance
A rambling tower of Babel,
A crow-stepped, roof-bent, rough-cast manse
With fruit on every gable.

My glebe is fifty acres round,
And there my corn is growing;
My poultry cluck with cosy sound;
I hear my cattle lowing.

Above the plane-trees, gray and high
My solid steeple rises;
It looms between me and the sky
Like other earthly prizes.

But I have clear and without fail,
Or trust in harvest's ripe end
For fiars' prices, on the nail,
Five hundred pounds of stipend:

And naught to do, the truth to speak,
Save sit and sip my toddy,
And write a sermon once a week,
And bury anybody.

Some half-a-dozen marriages
Come in the pairing season;
I visit sick folk if they please —
Or anything in reason.

The world is here some ages late,
And stagnant as a marish:
I thank my stars it is my fate
To have a country parish;

For wearing done with constant use
For me has no inducement,
And city charges play the deuce
With all a man's amusement.

The sheep are few: somehow to God
I'll answer how I fed mine...
And there's my gallant salmon-rod,
And there my famous red-line.

With these last autumn on the Earn
I killed the thirty-pounder
That seemed amid the lapping fern
No glossier, nor rounder,

Than cased in glass it looks there — see,
Beneath my gun and pipe-rack —
The gun the earl presented me,
My seasoned pipes, a ripe stack.

My single life contents me yet;
I have some oats to scatter:
A barmaid or a ballet-pet
Is no such deadly matter,

When one is on the sunny side
Of thirty and an athlete:
At thirty-five I'll take a bride,
And make the narrow path meet,

As many a man has done before,
The broad one: it will lead me
To live in health and see fourscore,
And have my son succeed me.