After reading W.D. “Bill” Ehrhart’s poem “The Farmer”, the first time through, I looked him up on the internet. He has written both poetry and prose, and a lot of his writing reflects his experiences in Vietnam, even the poems that, on the surface, do not seem to mention the war.
His website, https://wdehrhart.com/biography.html, has some of his prose and poetry available for visitors to peruse, and it makes for interesting reading.
One of those poems is “The Farmer,” and after reading it a couple times and from also looking at some of his other work, (and a review of poetry by him and other “Vietnam Vet Poets” at http://worldsofhurt.com/chapter-five/), I started to see The Farmer as not just a poem about a man literally working the “barren earth,” but as an allegory for his post-war life, dealing with the trauma (and perhaps the PTSD-one of his other poems shows him reflecting on his anger and how it scares his wife and daughter) that hits many veterans. As a man, depicted as a farmer, who every day has to go out into society, and work the fields of life, despite how he feels as he deals with the emptiness in his soul as he works through “the slow intransigent intensity of need.”
Similarly, I see the line “I have sown my seed on soil guaranteed by poverty to fail” as what he sees as his failings as a husband and father (look at his poem The Simple Lives of Cats) likely due to his problems from his war experience.
The passage:
But I don’t complain—except
to passersby who ask me why
I work such barren earth.
They would not understand me
if I stooped to lift a rock
and hold it like a child, or laughed,
or told them it is their poverty
I labor to relieve. For them,
I complain.
Can be seen as the experience of a veteran who encounters civilians in everyday life, who do not understand what he does and why. I have read and heard that the comment people often tell to veterans and active duty military, “Thank you for your service,” is often looked at by many vets as a meaningless platitude by well-meaning people who can’t think of anything deeper to say. The line, “I work such barren earth. They would not understand me,” I think speaks to this, as anyone who was not in Vietnam (or Kuwait, or Iraq, or Afghanistan) can truly understand what the veteran went though.
“They would not understand me…[if] told them it is their poverty I labor to relieve,” is significant in this context, as the veteran knows those well-meaning people would not understand what is going on inside him and how he deals with the barrenness of his heart and soul, despite the fact that he served in their stead in the war(s), for it is their poverty he labors to relieve. This goes back to the “Thank you for your service” line, where the unspoken piece of that phrase could very well be…”in our place, since you went to war and we did not.” Again, the non-veteran can never truly know what barren fields the veteran is plowing and working as Ehrhart phrases it “Each day I go into the fields” to try to heal the “barren earth” of his soul.