The Depths of the Grass

Look, in the early light, 
   Down to the infinite 
   Depths at the deep grass-roots; 
      Where the sun shoots 
In golden veins, as looking through 
   A dear pool one sees it do; 
   Where campion drifts 
Its bladders, iris-brinded, through the rifts 
      Of rising, falling seed
   That the winds lightly scour—
Down to the matted earth where over 
   And over again crow’s-foot and clover
      And pink bindweed
      Dimly, steadily flower.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 20, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“The Depths of the Grass” first appeared in Michael Field’s Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses (Thomas B. Mosher, 1898). A sonnet, though one written mostly in rhyming couplets, the poem offers a magnified glimpse into the oft-overlooked world of grass at our feet. In “Michael Field’s Wordsworth,” published in Victorian Poetry 58, no. 4, scholar Alex Murray writes, “Michael Field invite [sic] us here to think about grass as itself a complex ecosystem that sustains life. It is important that the poem refuses the pathetic fallacy, or to use the grass as the vehicle for poetic reflection. The grass is just grass, home to the modest aesthetic qualities of rose campion and bindweed. Yet in its infinite depths it offers a reminder that nature is an impenetrable mystery rather than a canvas. This celebration of the humble and ubiquitous monocotyledons is, I want to suggest, a response to [William] Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” in which the joy of gazing upon grass and flower can never be regained [. . .].”