Explore "The Arrowmaker" by Helen Gray Cone on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Day in, day out, or sun or rain, / Or sallow leaf, or summer grain, / Beneath a wintry morning moon / Or through red smouldering afternoon, / With simple joy, with careful pride, / He plies the craft he long has plied: / To shape the stave, to set the sting, / To fit the shaft with irised wing; / And farers by may hear him sing, / For still his door is wide: / "Laugh and sigh, live and die, -- / The world swings round; I know not, I, / If north or south mine arrows fly!"
And sometimes, while he works, he dreams, / And on his soul a vision gleams: / Some storied field fought long ago, / Where arrows fell as thick as snow. / His breath comes fast, his eyes grow bright, / To think upon that ancient fight. / Oh, leaping from the strainèd string / Against an armoured Wrong to ring, / Brave the songs that arrows sing! / He weighs the finished flight: / "Live and die; by and by / The sun kills dark; I know not, I, / In what good fight mine arrows fly!"