Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE PLOUGHMAN (IN WELSH UPLANDS), by ARTHUR GLYN PRYS-JONES


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE PLOUGHMAN (IN WELSH UPLANDS), by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Here did his fathers live and pass
Last Line: And burned and died amid the spears.
Subject(s): Wales; Welshmen; Welshwomen


HERE did his fathers live and pass
To slumber after ceaseless toil,
Sealing beneath the springing grass
Their silent epic of the soil.

For here they tilled and hardly won
From out the slow and stubborn weald
In murk and mist and kindlier sun
These acres and their scanty yield.

And here he stands, as oft they stood,
Untutored in the Saxon speech,
Driving his furrows from the wood
Down to the long, low river-reach.

His words are few and few his needs,
He seeks no quarrel with his kind,
And silence deeper silence breeds
Within the mazes of his mind.

Yet men have seen at one loved name
His quiet face suffuse with fire,
A word that wakes within his frame
The pulse of some Silurian sire,

Who, in this place and by this home,
Heard from afar the tramping feet,
And knew the awful arm of Rome
Had groped to find his green retreat,

Then swiftly to the onset came,
Like some avenger of the years,
Swept on the cohorts like a flame,
And burned and died amid the spears.





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