Poet Farmers

I was thinking about poems about farming, and decided that there are probably more poet farmers than, say, science-fiction writing farmers (does Stephen King dare to raise corn, do you suppose?) Wendell Berry comes first to my mind; Suellyn Shupe posted a poem by Berry on the blog earlier this season. I like “The Man Born to Farming” especially. Here’s an excerpt:

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

Walt Whitman wrote a wonderful short poem called “A Farm-Picture”:

Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding;
And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away.

Then there was Carl Sandburg, a fellow who knew something about the Midwest with its fields of grain and pastures of cattle. He apparently caught the corn laughing at him once, and that inspired him to write “The Laughing Corn,” of which this is an excerpt:

There was a high majestic fooling
Day before yesterday in the yellow corn.
And day after to-morrow in the yellow corn
There will be high majestic fooling.
The ears ripen in late summer
And come on with a conquering laughter,
Come on with a high and conquering laughter.

But enough about corn! One of my favorite poets, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, wrote an ode to tomatoes that I really like; I think I’ll post the entire poem as a separate blog entry (done--here's the link). Other poets who were farmers . . . Robert Burns (he wrote a poem about turning up a mouse nest with his plow), Henry David Thoreau (his poem “I Am the Autumnal Sun” has some nice harvest images in it), and Robert Frost.

It has been said about Robert Frost that it is hard to tell which was his vocation and which his avocation—he was dedicated to both farming and poetry. The illustration at the top of this blog entry is a woodcut by J. J. Lanke of Frost's farm in Derry, New Hampshire. But even he occasionally was a bit overwhelmed by the harvest; I like his poem, “After Apple-Picking,” when he realizes just how many apples he has. It reminds me a bit of the yield of the pear tree in the Schenks’ yard:

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

Do you have a favorite farming poem, or a favorite poet farmer? Let us know!