Classic and Contemporary Poetry
FAR EAST, by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: Old hamlets with your fragrant flowers Last Line: Now folded like the rest. Alternate Author Name(s): Blunden, Edmund Subject(s): Japan; Japanese | ||||||||
OLD hamlets with your fragrant flowers And honey for the bee, Your curtained taverns, chiming towers, Droning songs and twilight hours And nodding industry -- Fine fields, wide-lapped, whose loveliest-born Day's first bright cohort finds, And steals away; whose lustier corn The red-faced churl invades at morn And proud as Caesar binds -- Uplands and groves that from the West Have the last word for me, Think not your image in my breast Was darkened when I sang my best Beside an Eastern sea. Beside an Eastern sea the pines In tufty spinneys drowse, The firefly-grass beneath them shines Blue-lanterned, and the chaliced vines Climb witch-like to the boughs; And girdled green there bask the plains Where, with his timeless smiles, And mushroom-hat, brown Vigour gains His splindling roots, his haulms, his grains -- The Oriental Giles. He serves a god much like your own, Who, peeping from the rows, Brings gourds the greatest ever grown, And peerless pumpkins; smooths the down Of these fruits, lacquers those. Thence the young child at home awaits, Bright-peering as a mouse, Her share of country delicates, And chatters bold to her young mates About the smoky house. The bronze cicada twangs all day, And the silver-soft at night Cools the snake's thicket by the way Where heaps the sturdy disarray Of husbandry's delight. In rural music bold or frail Contentment's anthem fills, And, roving the rude-ripened vale, If restless spirits sometime fail, Here too are heavenly hills. Sleep's master-dream there stands alone: The mount of East and West! The still hour come, his monstrous cone Is a timid flower this morning blown, Now folded like the rest. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...CHOMEI AT TOYAMA by BASIL BUNTING SONG: SO OFTEN, SO LONG I HAVE THOUGHT by HAYDEN CARRUTH A MONTH IN SUMMER by CAROLYN KIZER TWO JAPANESE POEMS by WILLIAM MEREDITH KEEP DRIVING by NAOMI SHIHAB NYE WATERLILIES AND JAPANESE BRIDGE by ALICIA SUSKIN OSTRIKER A WALKAROUND, FOR NEKO; KAMAKURA 11/10/96 by JEROME ROTHENBERG AT TSUKIJI MARKET TOKYO: 1 by JEROME ROTHENBERG ALMSWOMEN by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN |
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