Peasants

Not Greuze's ploughmen made insipid in
The melting colours of his pastorals,
So neatly dressed, so rosy, that one laughs
To see the sugared idyll chastening
The pastels of a Louis Quinze salon,
But dirty, gross, and bestial--as they are.

Penned round some market town in villages,
They know not them who traffic in the next,
But hold them enemies to cheat and rogue.
Their fatherland? Not one believes in it,
Except that it makes soldiers of their sons,
To steal their labour for a span of years.
What is the fatherland to yokels? They
See only, in a corner of their brains,
Vaguely, the king, magnificent man of gold,
In the braided velvet of his purple robes,
A sceptre, and gemmed crowns escutcheoning
The panelled walls of gilded palaces,
Guarded by sentinels with tasselled swords.
This do they know of power. It is enough.
And for the rest their heavy feet would march
In clogs through duty, liberty, and law.
In everything by instinct ankylosed,
A dirty almanac is all they read;
And though they hear the distant cities roaring,
So terrified are they by revolutions,
That they are riveted to serfdom's chains,
Fearing, if they should rear, the iron heel.

Along the black roads hollowed out with ruts,
Dung-heaps in front and cinder-heaps behind,
Stretch with low roofs and naked walls their huts
Under the buffeting wind and lashing rain.
These are their farms. And yonder soars the church,
Stained, to the north, with ooze of verdigris,
And farther, squared with ditches, lie their fields,
Fertile in patches, thanks to fat manure,
And to the harrow's unrelenting teeth.
There they keep tilling with their obstinate hands
The black glebe mined by moles, and rotten with
Detritus, pregnant with the autumn's sperm.
With dripping brow they drive the spade in deep,
Doubled above the furrows they must sow,
Under the hail of March that whips their back.
And in the summer, when the ripe rye rocks
With golden glints under the pouring sun,
Here, in the fire of long and torrid days,
Their restless sickle shaves the vast wheat-field,
While from their wrinkled foreheads runs the sweat,
Opening their skin from shoulders down to hips;
Noon darts its brazier rays upon their heads;
So raw the heat is that in meslin fields
The too dry ears burst open, and the beasts,
Their necks with gadflies riddled, pant in the sun.
And let November slow to die arrive,
Rolling his hectic rattle through deaf woods,
Howling his sobs and ending not his moans,
Until his death-knell sounds--still runs their sweat.
Always anew preparing future crops,
Under a sky spouting from swollen clouds,
While the north wind tears big holes in the woods,
And sweeps the broken stubble from the fields,
So that their bodies soon in ruin fall:
Let them be young and comely, broadly built,
Winter that chills, summer that calcines them,
Makes their limbs loathsome and their lungs short-breathed;
Or old, and bearing the down-weighing years,
With blear eyes, broken backs, and useless arms,
And horror stamped upon their hedgehog face,
They stagger under the ruin-loving wind.
And when Death opens unto them its doors;
Their coffin sliding into the soft earth
Seems only to contain a thing twice dead.

II.

On evenings when through eddying skies the wind
Is whirling the swarming snow across the fields,
Grey-headed farmers sit in reckonings lost,
Near lamps from which a thread of smoke ascends.
The kitchen is unkempt and slatternly:
A string of dirty children by the stove
Gorge the spilt remnants of the evening meal;
Mangy and bony cats lick dishes clean;
Cocks make their beaks ring upon pewter plates;
Damp soaks the leprous walls; and on the hearth
Four flickering logs are twisting meagre shanks
Dying with listless tongues of pale red ray;
The old men's heads are full of bitter thoughts.
"For all the seasons unremitting toil,
With all hands at the plough a hundred years,
The farm has passed from father on to son,
And, with good years and bad, remains the same,
Jogging along upon the brink of ruin."
This is what gnaws and bites them with slow tooth.
So like an ulcer hate is in their hearts,
Patient and cunning hate with smiling face.
Their frank and loud good nature hatches rage;
Wickedness glimmers in their icy looks;
They stink of the rancorous gall that, age by age,
Their sufferings have collected in their souls.
Keen are they on the slightest gain, and mean;
Since they can not enrich themselves by work,
Stinginess makes their hearts hard, their hearts fetid;
And black their mind is, set on petty things,
And stupid and confounded before great;
As they had never raised their eyes unto
The sun, and seen magnificent sunsets
Spread on the evening, like a crimson lake.

III.

But kermesse is for them a festival,
Even for the dirtiest, the stingiest,
There go the lads to keep the wenches warm.
A huge meal, greased with bacon and hot sauces,
Makes their throats salty and enflames their thirst.
They roll in the inns, with rounded guts, and hearts
Aflame, and break the jaws and necks of those
Come from the neighbouring town, who try, by God!
To lick the village girls too greedily,
And gorge a plate of beef that is not theirs.

Savings are squandered--for the girls must dance,
And every chap must treat his mate, until
The bottles strew the floor in ugly heaps.
The proudest of their strength drain huge beer-mugs,
Their faces fire-plated, darting fright,
Horrid with bloodshot eyes and clammy mouth,
In the dark rumbling revels kindle suns.
The orgy grows. A stinking urine foams
In a white froth along the causey chinks.
Like slaughtered beasts are reeling topers floored.
Some are with short steps steadying their gait;
While others solo bawl a song's refrain,
Hindered by hiccoughing and vomiting.

In brawling groups they ramble through the town,
Calling the wenches, catching hold of them,
Hugging them, shoving at them,
Letting them go, and pulling them back in rut,
Throwing them down with flying skirts and legs.
In the taverns--where the smoke curls like grey fog
And climbs to the ceiling, where the gluing sweat
Of heated, unwashed bodies, and their smells
Dull window-panes and pewter-pots with steam--
To see battalions of couples crowd
In growing numbers round the painted tables,
It looks as if their crush would smash the walls.
More furiously still they go on swilling,
Stamping and blustering and raging through
The cries of the heavy piston and shrill flute.
Yokels in blue smocks, old hags in white bonnets,
And livid urchins smoking pipes picked up,
All of them jostle, jump, and grunt like pigs.
And sometimes sudden wedges of new-comers
Crush in a corner the quadrille that looks,
So unrestrained it is, like a mixed fight.
Then try they who can bawl the loudest, who
Can push the tidal wave back to the wall,
Though with a knife's thrust he should stab his man.
But the band now redoubles its loud din,
Covers the quarrelling voices of the lads,
And mingles all in leaping lunacy.
They calm down, joke, touch glasses, drunk as lords.
The women in their turn get hot and drunk,
Lust's carnal acid in their blood corrodes,
And in these billowing bodies, surging backs,
Freed instinct grows to such a heat of rut,
That to see lads and lasses wriggling and writhing,
With jostling bodies, screams, and blows of fists,
Crushing embraces, biting kisses, to see them
Rolling dead drunk into the corners, wallowing
Upon the floor, knocking themselves against
The panels, sweating, and frothing at the lips,
Their two hands, their ten fingers ransacking
And emptying torn corsages, it seems--
Lust is being lit at the black fire of rape.
Before the sun burns with red flames, before
The white mists fall in swaths, the reeking inns
Turn the unsteady revellers out of doors.
The kermesse in exhaustion ends, the crowd
Wend their way homewards to their sleeping farms,
Screaming their oaths of parting as they go.
The aged farmers too, with hanging arms,
Their faces daubed with dregs of wine and beer,
Stagger with zigzag feet towards their farms
Islanded in the billowing seas of wheat.