Stranger: What kind your people are
I would wish to know:
Round-shouldered men like rolling-stock
Great in despair
Simple in prayer
And their hard hands tear
The clay on the rock
Where the plough cannot go?
Poet: 'Tis not so
Faint-hearted folk my people are
To poverty's house they have never invited
The giant Pride
But await the world
Where wrongs are righted.
They till their fields and scrape among the stones
Because they cannot be schoolmasters
They work because Judge Want condemns the drones.
Dear stranger duty is a joke
Among my peasant folk.
Stranger: Poet be fair
You surely must have seen
Beneath these rags of care
Hearts that were not mean
And cowardly and faint.
Poet: Why O why
Should poet seek to prove
The spirit of a saint
For one in love
Would never probe or pry
Into the mystery
Of that is gods
In the turning clods
I cannot tell you what you ask
But I shall tell you other things
I shall fill the flask
Of your curiosity with bitterings
Stranger: I will go
To my town back again
And never desire to know
The hearts of your women and men.
Poet: Our women are humble as dust
They eat the hard crust
They suckle our children and we
Drink the milk of high mystery.
Stranger: I will go
To my townful of vermin
That sways to and fro
Like fool heads at a sermon
I will pour out for them
Your vitriol of hell
And may Christ condemn
My soul if I tell
The dream of your folk
That arose as you spoke.
§ Line 25, 'O' is an insertion.
Lines 30-32 are corrected from:
'Into the mysteried cove
Where all that is gods
Is safe from the hurtling clods.'
