| |
| ACROSS the sea a land there is, | |
| Where, if fate will, men may have bliss, | |
| For it is fair as any land: | |
| There hath the reaper a full hand, | |
| While in the orchard hangs aloft | 5 |
| The purple fig, a-growing soft; | |
| And fair the trellis’d vine-bunches | |
| Are swung across the high elm-trees; | |
| And in the rivers great fish play, | |
| While over them pass day by day | 10 |
| The laden barges to their place. | |
| There maids are straight, and fair of face, | |
| And men are stout for husbandry, | |
| And all is well as it can be | |
| Upon this earth where all has end. | 15 |
| For on them God is pleas’d to send | |
| The gift of Death down from above, | |
| That envy, hatred, and hot love, | |
| Knowledge with hunger by his side, | |
| And avarice and deadly pride, | 20 |
| There may have end like everything | |
| Both to the shepherd and the king: | |
| Lest this green earth become but hell | |
| If folk thereon should ever dwell. | |
| Full little most men think of this, | 25 |
| But half in woe and half in bliss | |
| They pass their lives, and die at last | |
| Unwilling, though their lot be cast | |
| In wretched places of the earth, | |
| Where men have little joy from birth | 30 |
| Until they die; in no such case | |
| Were those who till’d this pleasant place. | |
| There soothly men were loth to die, | |
| Though sometimes in his misery | |
| A man would say “Would I were dead!” | 35 |
| Alas! full little likelyhead | |
| That he should live forever there. | |
| So folk within that country fair | |
| Liv’d on unable to forget | |
| The long’d-for things they could not get, | 40 |
| And without need tormenting still | |
| Each other with some bitter ill; | |
| Yea, and themselves too, growing gray | |
| With dread of some long-lingering day, | |
| That never came ere they were dead | 45 |
| With green sods growing on the head; | |
| Nowise content with what they had, | |
| But falling still from good to bad | |
| While hard they sought the hopeless best; | |
| And seldom happy or at rest | 50 |
| Until at last with lessening blood | |
| One foot within the grave they stood. | |
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