Poems New and Old. John Freeman

But O, when that wind comes up out of the west

       New-winged with Autumn from the distant sea

       And springs upon you, how should not dreaming be

       A remembered and renewing agony?

       Then are your breasts, O unleaved beeches, again

       Torn, and your thighs and arms with the old strain

       Stretched past endurance; and your groans I hear

       Low bent beneath the hoofs by that fierce charioteer

       Driven clashing over; till even dreaming is

       Less of a present agony than this.

      Fall gentler sleep upon you now, while soft

       Airs circle swallow-like from hedge to croft

       Below your lowest naked-rooted troop.

       Let evening slowly droop

       Into the middle of your boughs and stoop

       Quiet breathing down to your scarce-quivering side

       And rest there satisfied.

      Yet sleep herself may wake

       And through your heavy unlit dome, O Mount of beeches, shake.

       Then shall your massy columns yield

       Again the company all day concealed. …

       Is it their shapes that sweep

       Serene within the ambit of the Moon

       Sentinel'd by shades slow-marching with moss-footed hours that creep

       From dusk of night to dusk of day—slow-marching, yet too soon

       Approaching morn? Are these their grave

       Remembering ghosts?

       … Already your full-foliaged branches wave,

       And the thin failing hosts

       Into your secrecies are swift withdrawn

       Before the certain footsteps of the dawn.

      But you, O beeches, even as men have root

       Deep in apparent and substantial things.

       Birds on your branches leap and shake their wings,

       Long ere night falls the soft owl loosens her slow hoot

       From the unfathomed fountains of your gloom.

       Late western sunbeams on your broad trunks bloom,

       Levelled from the low opposing hill, and fold

       Your inmost conclave with a burning gold.

       … Than those night-ghosts awhile more solid, men

       Pass within your sharp shade that makes an arctic night

       Of common light,

       And pause, swift measuring tree by tree; and then

       Paint their vivid mark,

       Ciphering fatality on each unwrinkled bark

       Across the sunken stain

       That every season's gathered streaming rain

       Has deepened to a darker grain.

       You of this fatal sign unconscious lift

       Your branches still, each tree her lofty tent;

       Still light and twilight drift

       Between, and lie in wan pools silver sprent.

       But comes a day, a step, a voice, and now

       The repeated stroke, the noosed and tethered bough,

       The sundered trunk upon the enormous wain

       Bound kinglike with chain over chain,

       New wounded and exposed with each old stain.

       And here small pools of doubtful light are lakes

       Shadowless and no more that rude bough-music wakes.

      So on men too the indifferent woodman, Time,

       Servant of unseen Master, nearing sets

       His unread symbol—or who reads forgets;

       And suns and seasons fall and climb,

       Leaves fall, snows fall, Spring flutters after Spring,

       A generation a generation begets.

       But comes a day—though dearly the tough roots cling

       To common earth, branches with branches sing—

       And that obscure sign's read, or swift misread,

       By the indifferent woodman or his slave

       Disease, night-wandered from a fever-dripping cave.

       No chain's then needed for no fearful king,

       But light earth-fall on foot and hand and head.

      Now thick as stars leaves shake within the dome

       Of faintly-glinting dusking monochrome;

       And stars thick hung as leaves shake unseen in the round

       Of darkening blue: the heavenly branches wave without a sound,

       Only betrayed by fine vibration of thin air.

       Gleam now the nearer stars and ghosts of farther stars that bare,

       Trembling and gradual, brightness everywhere. …

       When leaves fall wildly and your beechen dome is thinned,

       Showered glittering down under the sudden wind;

       And when you, crowded stars, are shaken from your tree

       In time's late season stripped, and each bough nakedly

       Rocks in those gleamless shallows of infinity;

       When star-fall follows leaf-fall, will long Winter pass away

       And new stars as new leaves dance through their hasty May?

       —But as a leaf falls so falls weightless thought

       Eddying, and with a myriad dead leaves lies

       Bewildered, or in a little air awhile is caught

       Idly, then drops and dies.

      Look at the stars, the stars! But in this wood

       All I can understand is understood.

       Gentler than stars your beeches speak; I hear

       Syllables more simple and intimately clear

       To earth-taught sense, than the heaven-singing word

       Of that intemperate wisdom which the sky

       Shakes down upon each unregarding century,

       There lying like snow unstirred,

       Unmelting, on the loftiest peak

       Above our human and green valley ways.

       Lowlier and friendlier your beechen branches speak

       To men of mortal days

       With hearts too fond, too weak

       For solitude or converse with that starry race.

       Their shaken lights,

       Their lonely splendours and uncomprehended

       Dream-distance and long circlings 'mid the heights

       And deeps remotely neighboured and attended

       By spheres that spill their fire through these estranging nights:—

       Ah, were they less dismaying, or less splendid!

       But as one deaf and mute sees the lips shape

       And quiver as men talk, or marks the throat

       Of rising song that he can never hear,

       Though in the singer's eyes her joy may dimly peer,