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| THE ROSES and vines and the tall, straight, delicate poplars, | |
| Growing about a beautiful old sixteenth-century French chateau, | |
| One clear morning of autumn were strung with silver ropes of spider-web, | |
| And the cold, green grass with its butterfly leaves | |
| Was rimmed with white dew. | 5 |
| From the tops of the poplars could have been seen the fields, | |
| Far away in the sunlight, sere and brown like a flooring— | |
| Out there sere and brown with the last of their summer music. | |
| |
| A valet with a duster in his hand and on his forearm a dust cloth— | |
| He may have been Swiss, for he wore a loin-cloth of forest green | 10 |
| Entered a front room of the chateau and suddenly stood perfectly still there, | |
| Listening amid the decorous morning silence of the chateau | |
| To a loud, nasty, little foreign noise coming from somewhere. | |
| He uttered a few words, straight as the poplars but far from being so delicate. | |
| Uttered them in a language of the Academy and of Fabre, | 15 |
| Finding the language of Fabre adequate for what he had to say regarding a bug, | |
| Adding in the same language, “What are you doing there under that rug?” | |
| And forward he strode and gave a quick | |
| Academic or dithyrambic or choric kick | |
| At the loose beautiful old marble (perhaps) brick. | 20 |
| |
| And the Cricket on the Hearth, | |
| For all its matutinal spontaneous mirth, | |
| And without time for a sigh | |
| That no poet was nigh | |
| To see him die, | 25 |
| Was mashed—song and senses, back and belly— | |
| Into unpotted cricket jelly. | |
| And all the literary offspring of Boz, | |
| Boz who despised your sentimentality | |
| But doted on his own sentimentality | 30 |
| (As the rest of us)— | |
| All the literary offspring of Boz | |
| Who despise sentimentality about a Dresden shepherdess | |
| But dote on sentimentality about the toes of a cricket— | |
| The twentieth-century Bozzers, | 35 |
| Successors to those nineteenth-century ones | |
| Who loved the domestic canary, and the owl if perched on a bookcase, | |
| And the pheasant With its young and its nest if well arranged on a table— | |
| Served sous cloche like mushrooms, | |
| The twentieth-century Bozzers, green and leafy with genius | 40 |
| And ready to exude poetic gum at the bare mention of the natural, | |
| Laboring at the cult of the natural | |
| And therefore never natural themselves | |
| Because no cult is natural | |
| But is a saturated solution of self-consciousness, | 45 |
| All the Neo-Bozzers must have wailed aloud | |
| At the sudden violent death | |
| Of the Cricket on the Hearth— | |
| A natural thing making natural music, | |
| Having been caught in an altogether unnatural place. | 50 |
| |
| But the valet lifted the little Dresden shepherdess from the mantelpiece | |
| And dusted her tenderly and put her back in her place, | |
| As the valet before him had done, | |
| As the valet after him would dust her tenderly and put her back in her place. | |
| But he held her awhile and at arm’s length and looked at her, | 55 |
| Smiled at her slippers and at the rose in her hand, | |
| Smiled at her hat tilted the way he had seen one, | |
| Thought of some one he loved and slipped his arm about her | |
| In advance of the coming dusk and counted the days to follow | |
| Before she should have fine things on her feet and her hair and her bosom. | 60 |
| |
| Then more briskly he went on with his dusting, | |
| The happier for the shepherdess as workman, lover and man, | |
| And none the worse for the happiness. | |
| |
| One day the Marquis, lord of the chateau and gardens, | |
| White and slight and slim like the poplars about his birthplace, | 65 |
| Paused before the shepherdess, thinking of the Marquise, | |
| Seeing her as she was in the days of their youth together— | |
| |
| Days now vanished forever beyond the brown fields of autumn. | |
| And all that day with a tenderer grace and an eye on the lost | |
| He watched her. | 70 |
| One day the Marquise, catching sight of the shepherdess, | |
| Suddenly thought of something laid away in its freshness, | |
| Folded still sweet and fresh in its antique woodwork. | |
| It she would send as a gift to the daughter of the curé, | |
| About to be married, a godchild. | 75 |
| |
| One day the abbé, the scholar, brother of the Marquis, | |
| Walking gravely in the room with thoughts of his history, | |
| Wheeled angrily before the little Dresden shepherdess on the mantelpiece, | |
| Remembering Marie Antoinette and her acres of pastoral playground | |
| In the forest of Versailles near the Petit Trianon. | 80 |
| Saw once more and more near him French follies and revolution, | |
| Went straight from the room and wrote more fiercely on avenging Time, | |
| Wrote on the work of France in the coming glory of the world. | |
| |
| But all the valets mashed all the crickets | |
| Singing in the morning stillness of the beautiful sixteenth-century French château. | 85 |
| And none of them as he dusted the shepherdess laid her in the nook of his arm | |
| And carried her out to the fields and set her up there with the crickets, | |
| Thinking the fields the place for the Dresden shepherdess. | |
| And none of them caught a cricket and brought it back to the château | |
| And dusted it and put it on the mantelpiece. | 90 |
| Or under the mantelpiece as the natural place for a cricket; | |
| And none of the valets, if he could help it, killed a cricket in the fields, | |
| But stepped over it carefully if tangled in the grass and unable to escape sudden death under his feet. | |
| |
| For the valets have nothing against the crickets in the fields | |
| Where nothing ends or defeats | 95 |
| The music of the earth— | |
| Read Keats! | |
| Glorious, undoctrined, undoctored spirit! | |
| Who sang of the grasshopper | |
| But who sang too of the Grecian urn on the mantelpiece | 100 |
| (Or some equivalent of the mantelpiece)— | |
| Sang of the sentimental, artificial scene on the Grecian urn— | |
| More sentimental, more artificial, than the little Dresden shepherdess— | |
| Sang of the artificial Greek heifer lowing at artificial Greek skies. | |
| Boundless poet of Nature | 105 |
| But poet also of all that is beautiful. | |
| In the bounded spirit of man— | |
| |
| The most beautiful thing in that spirit being man’s art. | |
| His art which is but little pictures | |
| To bring near him the beauty that is far away or beyond him. | 110 |
| Whether it be the little Dresden shepherdess on the mantelpiece, | |
| Or the Grecian urn on its mantelpiece | |
| With its sentimental, artificial heifer lowing at the skies | |
| And at the mystery of sacrifice; or whether it be | |
| The little wooden crucifix, held before dying eyes, | 115 |
| As the hope that, closing on earth, | |
They will open in paradise.
The Bookman | |
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