JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET, a poem

NOT far from Paris, in fair Fontainebleau,
     A lovely, memory-haunted hamlet lies,
     Whose tender spell makes captive, and defies
Forgetfulness. The peasants come and go,—
Their backs too used to stoop,—and patient sow
     The harvest which their narrow need supplies;
     Even as when, Earth's pathos in his eyes,
Millet dwelt here, companion of their woe.

Loved Barbizon! With thorns, not laurels, crowned,
He looked thy sorrows in the face, and found—
     Vital as seed warm nestled in the sod—
The hidden sweetness at the heart of pain;
Trusting thy sun and dew, thy wind and rain,
     At home with nature, and at one with God!

"Jean-François Millet" by Florence Earle Coates. Published in The Atlantic Monthly (November 1904), Mine and Thine (1904) and Poems (1916) Volume II.

The Gleaners (1857)
by Jean-François Millet
Wikimedia Commons

Jean-François Millet died on this day in 1875.