crossref-it.info - AS/A2 English Literature Study Guides - texts in context.Poems for study » Hurrahing in Harvest » Commentary on Hurrahing in Harvest
Looking up
The octave is divided into two quatrains. The first is more concerned with the skyscape than the landscape, echoing the fascination with sky in The Sea and the Skylark and The Windhover. This is picked up in the second quatrain: ‘I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes...’, echoing Psalm 121:
In the sestet, however, he is looking up ‘to glean our Saviour’, using a harvest image (‘glean’=gather the left-over grain after the harvesters have finished). A vision of God is what is left after the first glory, the beauty gathered by the eyes, is over.
Blindness
However, according to the sestet, not every one will necessarily see it: ‘but the beholder / Wanting’ (i.e. these things were here, and only (but) the beholder was lacking).
Spectators can not necessarily be ‘beholders’. Yet wherever there is someone there who is able to perceive a revelation or insight of God in this scene, then that person’s heart will be lifted even higher in some sort of mystical experience.
- What do you think ‘eyes’ and ‘heart’ symbolise in the sonnet?
- ll.7,8 are difficult.
- Can you paraphrase them?
- Is the poem a quietly contemplative one?
- If not, which words convey a sense of energy and action?
- What other poem uses the word ‘hurl’?
- Today's New International Version
- 1I lift up my eyes to the mountains - where does my help come from?
- King James Version
- 1I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the
stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely
behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our
Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love's greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding
shoulder
Majestic--as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!--
These things, these things were here and but the
beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off
under his feet.
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