Fresh Pastures Lure Their Steps Away!
He Sweeps His Hearth, And Homeward Looks In Vain,
Till Feeling Disappointment's Cruel Pain
His Fairy Revels Are Exchanged For Rage,
His Banquet Marred, Grown Dull His Hermitage,
The Field Becomes His Prison, Till On High
Benighted Birds To Shades And Coverts Fly.
"The field becomes his prison," and the thought of this trival
restraint, which is yet felt so poignantly, brings to mind an
infinitely greater one.
Look, he says -
From the poor bird-boy with his roasted sloes
to the miserable state of those who are confined in dungeons,
deprived of daylight and the sight of the green earth, whose
minds perpetually travel back to happy scenes,
Trace and retrace the beaten worn-out way,
whose chief bitterness it is to be forgotten and see no
familiar friendly face.
"Winter" is, I think, the best of the four parts it gives the
idea that the poem was written as it stands, from "Spring"
onwards, that by the time he got to the last part the writer
had acquired a greater ease and assurance. At all events it
is less patchy and more equal. It is also more sober in tone,
as befits the subject, and opens with an account of the
domestic animals on the farm, their increased dependence on
man and the compassionate feelings they evoke in us. He is,
we feel, dealing with realities, always from the point of view
of a boy of sensitive mina and tender heart - one taken in
boyhood from this life before it had wrought any change in
him.
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