Night on the rolling foliage fell: But I, who love old hymning night, And know the Dryad voices well, Discerned them as their leaves took flight, Like souls to wander after death: Great armies in imperial dyes, And mad to tread the air and rise, The savage freedom of the skies To taste before they rot. And here, Like frail white-bodied girls in fear, The birches swung from shrieks to sighs; The aspens, laughers at a breath, In showering spray-falls mixed their cries, Or raked a savage ocean-strand With one incessant drowning screech. Here stood a solitary beech, That gave its gold with open hand, And all its branches, toning chill, Did seem to shut their teeth right fast, To shriek more mercilessly shrill, And match the fierceness of the blast.
But heard I a low swell that noised Of far-off ocean, I was ’ware Of pines upon their wide roots poised, Whom never madness in the air Can draw to more than loftier stress Of mournfulness, not mournfulness For melancholy, but Joy’s excess, That singing on the lap of sorrow faints: And Peace, as in the hearts of saints Who chant unto the Lord their God; Deep Peace below upon the muffled sod, The stillness of the sea’s unswaying floor, Could I be sole there not to see The life within the life awake; The spirit bursting from the tree, And rising from the troubled lake? Pour, let the wines of Heaven pour! The Golden Harp is struck once more, And all its music is for me! Pour, let the wines of Heaven pour! And, ho, for a night of Pagan glee!
There is a curtain o’er us. For once, good souls, we’ll not pretend To be aught better than her who bore us, And is our only visible friend. Hark to her laughter! who laughs like this, Can she be dead, or rooted in pain? She has been slain by the narrow brain, But for us who love her she lives again. Can she die? O, take her kiss!
The crimson-footed nymph is panting up the glade, With the wine-jar at her arm-pit, and the drunken ivy-braid Round her forehead, breasts, and thighs: starts a Satyr, and they speed: Hear the crushing of the leaves: hear the cracking of the bough! And the whistling of the bramble, the piping of the weed!
But the bull-voiced oak is battling now: The storm has seized him half-asleep, And round him the wild woodland throngs To hear the fury of his songs, The uproar of an outraged deep. He wakes to find a wrestling giant Trunk to trunk and limb to limb, And on his rooted force reliant He laughs and grasps the broadened giant, And twist and roll the Anakim; And multitudes, acclaiming to the cloud, Cry which is breaking, which is bowed.