The Farm Terraces
The Farm Terraces - meaning Summary
Labor Shaping the Land
The poem depicts terraced farmland as the outcome of relentless human labor that both beautifies and brutalizes the landscape. It contrasts hand-built terraces ordered by necessity or authority with the communal, chant-like work of the poor who raise soil and harvest by hand. The speaker honors the long, physical craft that shapes contour and water, while hinting at changing pressures—economic and erosive—that now threaten those ancient, hard-won structures.
Read Complete AnalysesBeautiful merciless work around the slopes of earth terraces cut by curt hoe at the orders of hunger or a pointing lord. Levels eyed up to rhyme copied from grazing animals round the steeps of earth, balconies filtering water down stage to stage of drop. Wind-stirred colours of crop swell between walked bunds miles of grass-rimmed contour harvests down from the top by hands long in the earth. Baskets of rich made soil boosted up poor by the poor, ladder by freestone prop stanzas of chant-long lines by backwrenching slog, before money, gave food and drunk but rip now like slatted sails (some always did damn to) down the abrupts of earth.
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