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, And song and word his hopeless sense escape-- Sweet common word and lifted heavenly note-- So, beneath that bright rain, While stars rise, soar and stoop, Dazzled and dismayed I look and droop And, blinded, look again.
"Return, return!" O beeches sing you then. I like a tree wave all my thoughts with you, As your boughs wave to other tossed boughs when First in the windy east the dawn looks through Night's soon-dissolving bars. Return, return? But I have never strayed: Hush, thoughts, that for a moment played In that enchanted forest of the stars Where the mind grows numb. Return, return? Back, thoughts, from heights that freeze and deeps that burn, Where sight fails and song's dumb. And as, after long absence, a child stands In each familiar room And with fond hands Touches the table, casement, bed, Anon each sleeping, half-forgotten toy; So I to your sharp light and friendly gloom Returning, with first pale leaves round me shed, Recover the old joy Since here the long-acquainted hill-path lies, Steeps I have clambered up, and spaces where The Mount opens her bosom to the air And all around gigantic beeches rise.