[Jim Moonan]

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This poem, along with Richard Wilbur's analysis, made my morning. (What will the afternoon bring?)

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[John Riley]

It's a good poem but I don't think the rhymed couplets are the best choice. The imagery/theme is earth/nature/life/death and rhymed couplets give it a sing/song that undercuts that for me.

I'm certain this is a minority pov here. I understand that and it's cool.

[Jim Moonan]

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I can see your point, John. What arrested me was "Babylonian face" the final line — And Wilbur's understanding of it here:

The faces of sheep do, in fact, suggest the physiognomies of Mesopotamia and the Near East, and I remember Umberto Saba's poem in which he describes una capra dal viso semita, a goat with a Semitic face. Finally, I believe, the poem asks us to think of how long—in the lands which the Bible mentions, and in others, and in unrecorded times and places—the sheep have been with us. At the end of Robert Francis' poem, the stillness of a New England scene partakes of the timelessness of art and of things unchanged.

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[Hilary Biehl]

The "Babylonian face" struck me as well. For me, it read much like a poem for children - the rhymed couplets, the simplicity of the language - until that last line.