The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 23: HAPPY COUNTRY

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About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

HAPPY COUNTRY

Here by the bright blue creek the good ships lie

A-building, and the hammers beat and beat,

And the wood-smell is pleasant in the heat;

The strong ribs curve against the marsh and sky.

Here the old men are mowing in the sun,

And the hay-sweetness blends with the wild-rose;

At the field’s edge the scarlet lily glows;

The great clouds sail, and the swift shadows run,

And the broad undulant meadows gloom and smile;

Over the russet red-top warm winds pass,

The swallow swoops and swerves, the cattle stand

In the cool of shallow brooks—and all the while

Peace basks asleep, she dreams of some sad land

Leagues over sea, where youth is mown as grass.