John Dryden Quotes
1631–1700 England
John Dryden (19 August [O.S. 9 August] 1631 – 12 May [O.S. 1 May] 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate.
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Also known as: Dryden
537 quotes
Next, fenced with hedges and deep ditches round,
Exclude th’ encroaching cattle from the ground.
Pales no longer swell’d the teeming grain,
Nor Phœbus fed his oxen on the plain.
From ploughs and harrows sent to seek renown,
They fight in fields, and storm the shaken town.
The field is spacious I design to sow,
With oxen far unfit to draw the plough.
The sweating steers unharness’d from the yoke
Bring back the crooked plough.
An ox that waits the coming blow,
Old and unprofitable to the plough.
Who can cease to admire
The ploughman consul in his coarse attire?
No fruitful crop the sickly fields return;
But oats and darnel choke the rising corn.
Delve of convenient depth your threshing floor;
With temper’d clay then fill and face it o’er.
In vain the hinds the threshing floor prepare,
And exercise their flails in empty air.
On a short pruning-hook his head reclines,
And studiously surveys his gen’rous vines.
The low’ring spring, with lavish rain,
Beats down the slender stem and bearded grain.
In the sun your golden grain display,
And thrash it out and winnow it by day.
We may know
And when to reap the grain and when to sow,
Or when to fell the furzes.
You who supply the ground with seeds of grain,
And you who swell those seeds with kindly rain.
Attribution
Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Dryden (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.