imself. It is called "Spring in the Study." I quote only the second
part:

"What is this sudden gayety that shakes the grayest boughs?
A voice is calling fieldward--'T is time to start the ploughs!
To set the furrows rolling, while all the old crows nod;
And deep as life, the kernel, to cut the golden sod.
The pen--let nations have it;--we'll plough a while for God.

"When half the things that must be done are greater than our art,
And half the things that must be done are smaller than our heart,
And poorest gifts are dear to burn on altars unrevealed,
Like music comes the summons, the challenge from the weald!
'They tread immortal measures who make a mellow field!'

"The planet's rather pleasant, alluring in its way;
But let the ploughs be idle and none of us can stay.
Here's where there is no doubting, no ghosts uncertain stalk,
A-traveling with the plough beam, beneath the sailing hawk,
Cutting the furrow deep and true where Destiny will walk."

Lafcadio Hearn spoke with deep truth when he said that "the measure of
a poet is the largeness of thought which he can bring to any subject,
however trifling." Certainly Mrs. Dargan brings this largeness of
thought to her subject. Has the significance of the plough ever before
been so brought out? She makes one feel that there should be a plough
among the constellations. What are the chairs and harps and dippers in
comparison?

The poetry of mere talent is always middling poetry--"poems distilled
from other poems," as Whitman says. The work of a genius is of a
different order. Most current verse is merely sweetened prose put up
in verse form. It serves its purpose; the mass of readers like it.
Nearly all educated persons can turn it off with little effort. I have
done my share of it myself--rhymed natural history, but not poetry.
"Waiting" is my nearest approach to a true poem.

Wordsworth quotes Aristotle as saying that poetry is the most
philosophical of all writing, and Wordsworth agrees with him. There
certainly can be no great poetry without a great philosopher behind
it--a man who has thought and felt profoundly upon nature and upon
life, as Wordsworth himself surely had. The true poet, like the
philosopher, is a searcher after truth, and a searcher at the very
heart of things--not cold, objective truth, but truth which is its own
testimony, and which is carried alive into the heart by passion. He
seeks