Classic Poem

There is a camp upon a rounded hill
Where men do sleep more closely to the stars,
And tree-like shapes stand at its entrances,
Beside the small, dark, shadow-soldiery.

Deep in the gloom of days of isolation,
Withdrawn, high-up from the low, murmuring town,
These shadows sit, drooping around their fires,
Or move as winds dark-waving in a wood:

Staring at cattle on a neighbouring hill
They are oblivious as is stone or grass —
The clouds passed voiceless over, and the sun
Rose, and lit trees, and vanished utterly.

Then in the awful beauty of the world,
When stars are singing in dark ecstasy,
Those ox-like soldiers sit collected round
A thin, metallic echo of human song:

And click their feet and clap their hands in time,
And wag their heads, and make the white ghost owl
Flit from its branch — but still those tree-like shapes
Stand like archangels dark-winged in the sky.

And presently the soldiers cease to stir;
The thin voice sinks, and all at once is dead;
They lie down on their planks and hear the wind,
And feel the darkness fumbling at their souls.

They lie in rows as stiff as tombs or trees,
Their eyeballs imageless, like marble still;
And secretly they feel that roof and walls
Are gone, and that they stare into the sky.

It is so black, so black, so black, so black,
Those black winged shapes have stretched across the world,
Have swallowed up the stars, and if the sun
Rises again, it will be black, black, BLACK.