Classic Poem

With a dull axe you slowly fell the trees
Within that living grove which is my heart;
Scatter their boughs and humble to their knees
These tall strong-rooted trunks that stand apart,
Waiting to bear anew love's burst of flower,
Sheltering water of our hidden spring.
Now these are doomed; and here within the hour
Is a bleak hillside where the axes ring.

O, I had rather they went down in wrath,
On a great winter night of steel-breathed wind;
In a dark hurricane that cuts a path
Of wideswept desolation; but not thinned
Slowly, with steady blows, with creaking sound,
And I still here to see them on the ground.