Classic Poem

The long black trains are stealing from the city one by one;
Packed tight in corridors they stand, their holidays begun;
Tall, white-faced creatures blinking in the dead unnatural light,
Phantoms on to their eyeballs leaping out of the flying night—
Trees, lamps, stars, gusts of rain, all jumping in the brain.

They rattle through the evening air, hats, sticks and luggage, all
Unreal as clowns upon their way to some small country hall;
Their dumb, high, mournful faces dead as flowers with moon-white eyes,
When the soft humanising sun has sunk in chilly skies,
And vaguely a thin wind frets the trees' dark silhouettes.

By midnight they are driving down a narrow country road,
The thick trees watch on either side the horse and his dark load;
The trees come close about the horse, they seem to talk together,
The moon is floating in the sky, light as a white owl's feather;
Quiet jut the village roofs amid the clanging hoofs.

They enter the low farmhouse like men moving in a dream,
Who see great stars beyond a room, and in the candle-gleam,
They stand beside the window, and their blood's spring-reddened tides
Look up in that black world to where, soundless, a frail moon rides
In a thin vapour sea of hill and rock and tree.

They know not why they gaze upon the moon with troubled blood,
They tremble, for their brains are bright with its transparent flood;
Slowly they walk in dark-wreathed woods, like men fast bound with spells;
To where the faint immortal cry of travelling water dwells,
Whose cuckoo voice outsings the noise of mortal things.

The voice of water falling down from leaf and fern and stone,
The voice of hidden water on a pilgrimage unknown,
The tiny voice that calls shut up in miles of solid rock,
As if within this world's stone walls some other world should knock,
And press unhurrying by with a strange unhuman cry.

All day they stare among the trees that stand beside the pools,
Hour-long only a leaf will fall, and on mossed boulder stools
They sit and feel the drip of time so infinitely slow,
There is no motion in their minds, nowhere for time to flow;
And from that inner gaze fade years and months and days.

The leaves are rustling overhead as they sit bowed and still,
A crooked line of restless ants climbs up a little hill,
A thrush with head cocked on one side is showing one bright eye,
And sunlight mottling all the ground in silence flickers by—
Deep-sunken in a dream trunks of men and forest seem.

The sunlight plays upon their hair and flits from place to place;
The sunlight stirs within their bones and gilds each pallid face
Bending to falling water and the scent of the coming rose;
And blooming softly in the wood the spring wing-footed goes;
Like flowers strangely bright their faces are alight.

And thrush and robin, birch and oak, the hot sun's dancing rays
Work their strong magic in the brain, dumb-still they sit and gaze;
And beauty blinds them as they hear spring winds sea-hollowing blow;
Into a far and passionate land with wild starved looks they go;
Return! no land can give the life you fain would live.

Return, return unto your desks, and mount your office stools!
None shall remain within this quiet that broods 'round forest pools;
The sun will shine on when you're gone, still will the waters fall,
And other faces in the wood shall answer its faint call,
Shall wander through hot noons followed by slow-paced moons.

And sitting deep within the sun I watched them die away,
I watched their bodies fade like clouds upon a summer's day,
I watched the green boughs waving as in their graves they lie,
Their small white faces crumbling as they stare into the sky:
And O! the sky was bright with an ecstasy of light!