Country Roads

It's something of a cliche for poets to write about the countryside. Nature in all its bucolic glory, winding woodsy paths, sturdy country folk at work, all these have been done pretty much to death.

Some of the finest poetry, however, celebrates the rural life and scene. The two poems that I'm sharing today elevate the genre beyond the sentimental. One is about a sermon and one is, if you stretch the point just a bit, itself something like a sermon.

The Chapel

A little aside from the main road,
becalmed in a last-century greyness,
there is the chapel, ugly, without appeal
to the tourist to stop his car
and visit it. The traffic goes by,
and the river goes by, and quick shadows
of clouds, too, and the chapel settles
a little deeper into the grass.

But here once on an evening like this,
in the darkness that was about
his hearers, a preacher caught fire
and burned steadily before them
with a strange light, so that they saw
the splendour of the barren mountains
about them and sang their amens
fiercely, narrow but saved
in a way that men are not now.

                                                                                   R.S. Thomas
                                                                        from Collected Poems 1945-1990


After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be one or two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough,
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the owrld of hoary grass.
It melted and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend,
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load and load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what would trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone.
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

                                                                                     Robert Frost
                                                                              from North of Boston 1913