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 Already your full-foliaged branches wave, And the thin failing hosts Into your secrecies are swift withdrawn Before the certain footsteps of the dawn.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.