Classic Poem

Within the moving forest, where a shade
More brilliant than noon-light
Threw strangeness over friends, and fierce delight,
As through the lowering weather
They tramped together,
Upon the height
Of ledge on ledge up-piled, where bronze oaks cast
Their gusty moaning on the outland blast,
The winding-sheet of earth was being made;
And under the moist earth, made rich with meed
Of wind-swung falling nuts and leaves and cased seed,
The dark mole burrowed and I found him not.
O'er multitudinous hills, with rapid tread
Muffled by heaped leaves dead,
I journeyed where
No mortal dwelling rose in cold gray air
Save an old smithy. One great wheel forgot
Leaned on the abandoned door. The windy hours
Led me by oozy flat and sudden gentian flowers,
Led me by hemlock path and by dim pools where rain
Fell in sparse circles all the long twilight.

In purple mountain-cleft a cider mill
Uprose. The last wood gods came trooping for their fill
With " Here's to you before the red sun drops "
Swilling the amber juice. From ram horns fell adown
The pale witch-hazel woven for a crown
With frost-cracked bittersweet on tossing locks.
Then they all turned and up the height did flee;
Stoning black butternuts from the grim gallows-tree,
Cramming their crops
With winter apples pecked by birds' departing flocks,
With tumult they were vanished in still rocks.
They left no trace. Only the lumbering bear
Left his track there,
He that was gone so deep
For hollow-caverned sleep.

Upon the farmland frosty morning broke.
Blue forest smoke
Mile after mile was visible. The wains,
Loaded with hay, put wayfarers to pains
To give them all the road.
The fields with buckwheat stubble reddened wide,
The pumpkins stranded by a mellow tide
Lay amid sheaves of corn that, deeply bowing, owed
Some charmed obeisance not to be denied.
The air was blue, gray the horizon-range,
The sound of labor came distinct and strange,
And all the day I was unsatisfied,
Remembering vanished races.

Restless I wandered at the day's decline
By glassy river, and by vivid lake
Peopled alone by mounds the large ants make,
Till at the last
Through silent streets bordered with elm I passed
That since the Revolution have not stirred
Save at the flying bird,
Save at the fall of elm and maple leaves,
Like flickering memories. At the horizon-line
The sun through gathered cloud sent smouldering shine
Athwart the yellow, nest-revealing trees,
The grass yet green beneath, and glorious hill on hill.

All through the night
I heard the floods and lightnings wreak their will
On earth. With an unbridled wind I sped
O'er half the world, and heard his awful pride
Broken in cemeteries, where he cried,
" I came not here to strive against the dead! "
With rain I sank,
Blackening forest roots, down cold springs, dank
With drowned leaves; down many a mountain-side
Widened in streams, tossing old tree trunks wide
Apart, and whirling them together, till
The streams plunged headlong in a river, fair
Advancing, flanked with palisades, to sea,
And prows of vessels pushed the massed leaves easily
Aside, while they steamed to the river mouth;
And on the banks, sudden from north, from south,
Fires leaped up as for a victory.