Death and the Plowman by Sidney Keyes

[Image: “Death and the Plowman” by Hans Holbein]

Death and the Plowman                              

The Rider

O don’t, don’t ever ask me for alms;

The winter way I’m riding.   Beggar, shun

My jingling bonebag equipage, beware

My horse’s lifted hoof, the sinewed whip.

I am the man started a long time since

To drive into the famous land some call

Posterity, some famine, some the valley

Of bones, valley of bones, valley of dry

Bones where a critical mind is always searching

The poor dried marrow for a drop of truth.

Better for you to ask no alms, my friend.

The Plowman

It’s only the wind holds my poor bones together,

So take me with you to that famous land.

There I might wither, as I’m told some do,

Our of my rags and boast at last

The integrated skeleton of truth.

The Rider

The wind creeps sharper there, my hopeful friend,

Than you imagine.   There the crooked trees

Bend like old fingers; and at Hallowmas

The Lord calls erring bones to dance a figure.

The Plowman

What figure, friend?   Why should I fear that dancing?

The Rider

No man may reasonably dance

That figure, friend.   One saw it, one Ezekiel

Was only spared to tell of it.   That valley

Is no man’s proper goal, but some must seek it.

The Plowman

I might get clothing there.   A skeleton

Cannot go naked.

The Rider

Naked as the sky

And lonely as the elements, the man

Who knows that land.   The drypoint artist there

Scrabbles among the wreckage; poets follow

The hard crevasses, silly as starved gulls

That scream behind the plow.   Don’t stop me, friend,

Unless you are of those, and your fool’s pride

Would lure you to that land . . .

The Plowman

I will go with you.

Better plow-following, the searching wind

About my bones than this nonentity.

The Rider

Then get you up beside me, gull-brained fool.

BotH

We’re driving to the famous land some call

Posterity, some famine, some the valley

Of bones, valley of bones, valley of dry

Bones where there is no heat nor hope not dwelling:

But cold security, the one and only

Right of a workless man without a home.
                                                From August 1941.

From "The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes"
Rutledge, London (1945)