The Village

Rests on the meek head of a pastoral hill
A village whence, when summer skies are still,
You see a lapse of wandering silver glance
Near and afar among fair meads of France,
Along her poplar-lines and pasture-lands :
Here in the hamlet many a cottage stands,
The little all of simple country folk.
Who sow the seasonable seed, who yoke
Slow oxen to the ploughs or laden wains,
Who bind in sheaves the mellow, foodful grains.
Here in their native soil their lives are rooted,
Like their own trees all rosy and purple fruited :
To them their humble church is heaven on earth ;
The hoary priest received them at their birth
Into the world, God's minister, and he,
Their friend through life, at the end of life will be
Their angel, smoothing all the perilous way
Into the realms of everlasting Day.
Under a bowered porch on summer eves
Knits a blithe housewife, while among the leaves
Of pleasant orchards near two children laugh,
Pierrot and Marie ; in the swing they quaff
Delightful breezes, and the father hears,
Returning 'mid the simmering barley ears.

Alas ! their village feels the winter snow
Soiled, thawing, whitening her roadway now ;
And round her walls chill winds of winter blow.
Around her walls! ah! gazer, what of these?
They are more piteous than leafless trees!
Ruins unroofed, begrimed with flame and smoke,
On either side the one wide way invoke
With dumb, unconscious eloquence of woe
His pity, who knew them three brief moons ago:
Dreary from forth a dreary mist they loom,
I'lach, as he nears them, silent with one doom,
A cheery home, now wrecked and tenantless.
Like a marred face grown vacant with distress.
Yet hearken ! there are cries upon the air —
Pause, lover of our race, pause, and despair !
Where lately bloomed a garden full of flowers,
On the wet, trampled ground awoman cowers;
A woman with a baby at her breast
Weeps with low wailing : chin upon his chest,
With folded arms the man against a wall
In moody silence leans ; from forth a pall
Of snow three rudely-carven wooden crosses
Mark in yon field where moulder many corses :
There waved a harvest ! yet befouled in mire
Sweet human food lies, where the hosts of fire
Went devastating with remorseless tramp :
Yonder thin snows are thawing ; all the damp
Earth has been torn to many a ragged pit,
Where each fire-entrailed, moaning, mangling bolt aht.
Two children in the neighbouring orchard go ;
Yet young full meaning of their loss to know.
But solemnised with all their elders' woe
And all the melancholy scene, they try
Among charred fruits and branches to descry
Where hung so lately their own favourite swing.
Finding, poor babes ! a pleasure in wondering.
Not now one views the river glancing far
Among fair meadows, like a scimitar ;
But nearer, over sodden, sullen soil,
Somewhat, like one interminable toil
Of worm uncoiling, dusk, appears to wind
Slow through the mist, impalpably defined,
Along a hedgerow line, obscure and dank :
It is the serried foeman's cruel crawling rank !