There was once a young man who was studying to be a poet. He wanted to become one by Easter, and to marry, and to live by poetry.
To write poems, he knew, only consists in being able to invent something; but he could not invent anything. He had been born too late- everything had been taken up before he came into the world, and everything had been written and told about.
"Happy people who were born a thousand years ago!" said he. "It was an easy matter for them to become immortal. Happy even was he who was born a hundred years ago, for then there was still something about which a poem could be written. Now the world is written out, and what can I write poetry about?"
Then he studied till he became ill and wretched, the wretched man!
No doctor could help him, but perhaps the wise woman could. She lived in the little house by the wayside, where the gate is that she opened for those who rode and drove. But she could do more than unlock the gate. She was wiser than the doctor who drives in his own carriage and pays tax for his rank.
"I must go to her," said the young man.
The house in which she dwelt was small and neat, but dreary to behold, for there were no flowers near it- no trees. By the door stood a bee-hive, which was very useful. There was also a little potato-field, very useful, and an earth bank, with sloe bushes upon it, which had done blossoming, and now bore fruit, sloes, that draw one's mouth together if one tastes them before the frost has touched them.
"That's a true picture of our poetryless time, that I see before me now," thought the young man; and that was at least a thought, a grain of gold that he found by the door of the wise woman.
"Write that down!" said she. "Even crumbs are bread. I know why you come hither. You cannot invent anything, and yet you want to be a poet by Easter."
"Everything has been written down," said he. "Our time is not the old time."
"No," said the woman. "In the old time wise women were burnt, and poets went about with empty stomachs, and very much out at elbows.
The present time is good, it is the best of times; but you have not the right way of looking at it. Your ear is not sharpened to hear, and
I fancy you do not say the Lord's Prayer in the evening. There is plenty here to write poems about, and to tell of, for any one who knows the way. You can read it in the fruits of the earth, you can draw it from the flowing and the standing water; but you must understand how- you must understand how to catch a sunbeam. Now just you try my spectacles on, and put my ear-trumpet to your ear, and then pray to God, and leave off thinking of yourself"
The last was a very difficult thing to do- more than a wise woman ought to ask.
He received the spectacles and the ear-trumpet, and was posted in the middle of the potato-field. She put a great potato into his hand. Sounds came from within it; there came a song with words, the history of the potato, an every-day story in ten parts, an interesting story. And ten lines were enough to tell it in.
And what did the potato sing?
She sang of herself and of her family, of the arrival of the potato in Europe, of the misrepresentation to which she had been exposed before she was acknowledged, as she is now, to be a greater treasure than a lump of gold.