“Stay with us!”

“Stay with us!” is the earth’s final, collective appeal to the exhausted farmer in a vision at the threshold of death. Its force comes from a reversal: the fields that have called him “Master!” do not merely recognize his place among them; they gather around him and try to keep him. The plea makes his relation to the land at once intimate, sustaining, and impossible to leave.

The Call of the Fields

The appeal grows out of a landscape that seems to have acquired a voice. A lingering murmur comes from the woods; solitary trees tremble, dry leaves rustle over the grain, and the grass and wheat sway above the low fields. From this unsettled scene comes the first cry, “Master! Master!” Barley shakes as if weeping and clings to the farmer’s exhausted feet; rye seems to whine and block his way, while birds and wind join the mournful sound. Nature does not simply frame his final moments. It addresses him, and its address makes his identity as a farmer inseparable from the living ground around him.

The repeated title matters: the fields call him “Master!” before the farmer recognizes that they are speaking. When he looks around and answers, the landscape falls silent. Only when he moves to sow again with his empty, weary hand does the earth speak in a single chorus. The sequence makes sowing the hinge between the first call and the demand to remain: even at the end of his strength, his gesture toward the soil draws a response from the world he has worked.

From Welcome to Restraint

The shorter appeal, “Stay! Stay with us! Stay!”, quickly becomes a more encompassing “Stay with us! Stay with us!” The change in scale is matched by a change in feeling. At first, the voice may sound like an affectionate summons from the fields he has tended. Then everything seems to move toward him: grass crawls, wheat flows, and the strips of land encircle him. The landscape’s welcome becomes a force that closes around his body.

The vision makes that force concrete rather than abstract. The farmer wants to shout but cannot make a sound; he wants to flee but has no strength. Wheat entangles him, furrows hold him back, clods catch his feet, and trees block his way. Even teasels and stones wound him, while wind and darkness add to his confusion. The repeated appeal thus carries a double meaning: the land calls him as one of its own, but its insistence also feels like confinement. What nourished and defined him now seems to claim him completely.

The Last Invitation

After the chorus reaches its height, the farmer freezes and the surroundings fall silent. Lightning opens his eyes within the darkness, revealing God the Father on a throne of sheaves, stretching out his arms. The divine invitation addresses him as a “weary farmhand” and offers a destination beyond the earth’s demand that he stay. The movement from the fields’ collective plea to this final welcome gives the expression its place in the scene’s ending: the land’s attachment is powerful, but it is followed by the vision of a summons beyond mortal labor.

The appeal binds the farmer’s identity, work, and surroundings into one image. His empty hand still moves to sow; the crops answer as if his life among them had made them kin. Yet the scene does not leave that bond as simple pastoral harmony. Its tenderness is edged with fear, because the earth’s embrace also holds him fast. “Stay with us!” is therefore both a declaration of belonging and a last, irresistible effort to prevent departure, spoken by the landscape that has been the ground of his life.