Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. THE ONE FOUNDATION, by EDWARD CARPENTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. THE ONE FOUNDATION, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Only that people can thrive that loves its land
Last Line: Suspended.
Subject(s): Nations; Wealth; Riches; Fortunes


ONLY that people can thrive that loves its land and swears to make it
beautiful;
For the land (the Demos) is the foundation-element of human life, and if
the public relation to that is false, all else is of need false and inverted.
How can a flower deny its own roots, or a tree the soil from which it
springs?
And how can a people stand firmly planted under the sun, except as
mediators between Earth and Heaven—
To dedicate the gracious fruits of the ground to all divine uses?


Think of it—
To grow rich and beautiful crops for human food, and flowers and fruits to
rejoice the eye and heart,
What a privilege!
Yet this to-day is a burden and a degradation, thrust upon the poor and
despised.
The Scotch farm-lad strides across the ploughed leas, scattering with
princely hand the bread of thousands;
The Italian peasant ties his vines to the trellised canes with twigs of
broom, and the spring sunlight glances and twinkles on him from the cistern just
below;
The Danish boy drives the herds home from the lowlying pasture-lands in the
sweet clear air of evening;
And the world which is built upon the labor of these disowns them, and they
themselves sink earthward worn out with unheeded toil;
While the Politician and the Merchant who flourish on lies and fill the
people's ears and mouths with chaff are publicly seated in the highest places.

And the Earth rolls on, with all her burden of love unheeded,
And sadness falls on the peoples divorced from the breasts that fain would
suckle them.

Think of it—
To place a nation squarely on its own base, spreading out its people far
and wide in honored usefulness upon the soil,
Building up all uses and capacities of the land into the life of the
masses,
So that the riches of the Earth may go first and foremost to those who
produce them, and so onward into the whole structure of society;
To render the life of the people clean and gracious, vital from base to
summit, and self-determining,
Dependent simply on itself and not on cliques and coteries of speculators
anywhere; and springing thus inevitably up into wild free forms of love and
fellowship;
To make the wild places of the lands sacred, keeping the streams pure, and
planting fresh blooms along their edges; to preserve the air crystalline and
without taint—tempting the sun to shine where before was gloom;
To adorn the woodlands and the high tops with new trees and shrubs and
winged and footed things,
Sparing all living creatures as far as possible rather than destroying
them;
What a pleasure!
To do all this in singleness of heart were indeed to open up riches for
mankind of which few dream—
So much, so infinitely more than what is now called Wealth.

But to-day the lands are slimed and fenced over with denials; and those who
would cannot get to them, and those who own have no joy in them—except such
joy as a dog may have in a fodderam.
And so, even to-day, while riches untold are wrung from the Earth, it is
rather as a robbery that they are produced—without gladness or gratitude,
but in grief and sadness and lying and greed and despair and unbelief.
Say, say, what would those riches be, if the Earth and her love were free?

But all waits. And the thunderclouds brood in silence over the lands,
meditating the unlipped words of destiny; and the sky rains light upon the
myriad leaves and grass, searching inevitably into every minutest thing;
And Ignorance breeds Fear, and Fear breeds Greed, and Greed that Wealth
whose converse is Poverty—and these again breed Strife and Fear in endless
circles;

But Experience (which in time to all must come) breeds Sympathy, and
Sympathy Understanding, and Understanding Love;
And Love leads Helpfulness by the hand, to open the gates of Power
unlimited—even for that new race which now appears.

And the blue sea waits below the girdle of the sun-fringed shores, and lips
and laps through the millenniums, syllabling the unformed words which man alone
can pronounce entire;
And the sunlight wraps the globe of the Earth, and dances and twinkles in
the ether of the human heart,
Which is indeed a great and boundless ocean, in which all things float
suspended.





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