Classic Poem

I

THE WOOD.

All through the wood I walked: I sought the glade
Where the soft uncut grass makes fittest paths,
And by the pine harp-shaped, of Erin's bards
Or Welsh Cadwallader, or lady graced
To touch the sounding-strings, oft musing, —
Next I reached the eminence whence we look
Down on the village.

That small country-place,
Much domineered by elms (the fathers' care
By each new house to set a votive plant, —
Custom long dead), I sometimes paused to view, —
Not high with palace-walls, or storied keep;
Nor mossy abbeys, green in ivy bright;
Nor towering steeples, mentors of the sky, —
And sometimes heard such bell-notes as it has,
Sound out the common hour, or mortals' years,
Slow tolling from the wrinkled hand of one
Who meekly pulls the rope; and saw the smoke
Rise gradual, as the evening meal progressed,
Product of artists from a foreign strand.
Not wholly strange to me the far-off roofs
That flung, like Virgil's, taller shades at eve,
Nor greatly prized.

I sometimes heard,
Rising in intervals, the speechless wind
Sough through the pines, and touch the whispering oal leaf
In these wintry days, and whiff the snow-cloud
In the chill traveller's face. Not all alone,
Seeing the clouds go over the tall woods,
With patches of blue sky still intermixed,
Or spidery interlacings, as the sun,
Now lowering, drew bright webs out of the twigs,
And sometimes, in the pine, shot out his rays
Prismatic, — fringes of blue, gold, and red, —
Contrived, I think, for fit society,
Such as the titmice or the rabbit, scared
As each new nimble bound echoes his taps
Along the unheeding wood.

How still and spare!
Silent and dedicate the woodland spaces,
As the day's last hour, in dead of winter,
Counts upon the trees its lifeless dirges!
Was there no secret hidden deep in thee,
Thou faltering Silence? Hast thou never asked
Who's coming? standing there, the falling leaf
Alone thy monitor, or wandering breath
Of the unthoughtful air, or partridge-whirr,
Fearing our race as much as we fear thine.
All day the winter sun has spoiled the snow
On all the southern slopes, — melted it off,
And brought the russet forth, coin of the pine.
You almost think there might have lurked a breath
Of mute relenting in the eager frost
That hangs about you like a nettle robe,
Making the pulses ebb; but Winter's will
Designs more malice, and must chill to the end.

Well, I could pray, — could kneel, and beg the power
That keeps the voiceless solitude for such
As I, to intermit the old decrees,
The fixed resolve, that, in these northern climes,
Killing is the true fact of sharpest frost.
And yet his livelong inattention proves
His skin to hang far looser than my own,
And then fancy the dull man wandering round
As I, vexing the sly world with questions,
Heard his queries solved and plainly answered:
Came, by some taste of learning, to the sense
Of all the senseless facts, — both heat and cold;
Four seasons and two poles; two suns a-top;
An earth forever spinning to defeat,
Forever spinning to be brave again;
To-day the mute withdrawal; then the bound,
From whence exudes the multifarious kind, —
To walk a pale colossus o'er the dust!
Conceive I held all, clearly explicate,
Here in my hand: might I so front the wood?
Should it not flout and leer? cast grinning outlooks?
Or ask me why I came, the pet of Nature,
With my well-oiled locks to laugh at them,
Poor pensioners, in their rinds straitly enclosed,
And sometimes half allowed to drop a nut,
Cheap accident, if it live? Shall I, the heir
Of this poor wintry ancestor, insist
That I should probe the secret to disclose
The end of Nature's bashfulness, as if
Her breath were sweet as Persian amulet
In her face the shining curls of Helena,
And beauty's eyelash?

Wait! Decided closely,
He who much strives to stay the longest leaves
A little later than the earliest called,
Says a few words, arranges a few facts,
Then drops the veil, and enters Nature's hall.
I hurry forward where the leafless trees
Are wrapped in silence, as the red cold light
Of January's sunset touches each
As with a fire of icicles, — how calm!
Oh! transient gleams yon hurrying noisy train,
Its yellow carriages rumbling with might
Of volleyed thunder on the iron rail
Pieced by the humble toil of Erin's hand,
Wood and lake the whistle shrill awakening.
Transient, — contrast with the unthinking cold,
The ruddy glare of sunset in the west,
And the first flicker of the icy stars,
While the pale freezing moon calmly assists
To point their rays more sharp, — transient and stern!
To-morrow the cold loam spreads over man,
His swelling plans crushed out so utterly,
The deadest of the dead is no more sure;
But bright the snow-drift in the still moonshine;
Bright, as the crystal spicules cleave the air
In shivers; and the more alone he walks
Whose friends that were sleep in another land,
Or those who loved in youth now hate his name.

Brief trace of man goes in these wintry fields, —
A slow, consumptive figure sometime comes
To glean for scattered sticks, or rake his chip,
His poor Bucephalus a wheelbarrow;
And farther, in the margin of the piece,
A cottage light, precedent of a race
Who rise as far in Nature as her knees,
Wherein they much ignore that Nature lives.
And, in the days made mild by winter thaws,
I sometimes tracked the salient river-shore,
Or wandered on the ridges to the cliff, —
Brown fields devote to pastures, herdless now,
When sear the grasses, — and a wide domain
Whereon a son of earth, who knew this place,
Might cheer his lungs and taste a cheap delight.
Methinks I knew, or heard, of such a one,
Who sometimes came in winter, when the year
Seemed early flowering; he who first explored
The willow in its island, if the heat
Hid in the dark ditch-bottom did not stir
And silver its spruce catkin, and insist
That late or early she should show her flowers.
Oft musing thus, he visited the lodge
Of the sagacious muskrat building domed,
And noted how the fox, going his rounds
Daily and true as milkman's, came each time
To call at the brown cabin, and inquire
Upon the flesh of the inhabitant.
Too much, he thought, may man conceive himself.
Have these consistent creatures no concerns?
Or must we sink them on that poor excuse,
Replete with sound, called " instinct " ? Cheap device
Of close self-seeking, which dares not respire
A loving science, nor may grant the fox
E'en the poor drop of brains he ought to have.
He eats the muskrat, and we name him " wild, " —
And what eats man?

Sometimes, perchance, he paused,
Holding mute dialogue with stock and stone;
Nor idly passed the chopper at his tree,
Without demanding what the season wore,
What bird was at its song? if the sap stirred?
And long discussed that puzzling variance
Of maple-bud and willow-bark to know
Whether his eyes, or they, had started first.
From these tough-handed men, with broken nails,
Grimed fingers rich in frost-cracks, and short words,
Clad, like the groves, in bark, he often drew
Useful conclusions. And how much their work
Drives in upon their mind the stores of knowledge
That the small, probing, questionable man,
Who makes the fool of nature, never gets!
And though soft-hearted, and with nervous dread,
Still hearkened to their talk of otters killed,
Stories of snakes, and boat-loads of the muskrat
Slaughtered to-day, and the like crimes of the gun, —
Man being the cruelest murderer.

In March
He traced the warmish wood-depths, glad to explore
The sheltered darlings of the spring, whose leaves,
Earliest unbound in broad veratrum, take
The gazer's eye; and watched the cowslip's gold
In a forelooking mood; and heard the bee
Hum in the calla, while the beetle's rings
Drew their white circles on the gleaming sand:
For he could see and trust, — see and delight!
The compensation in his element
Came forth didactic, cousin to the scene,
Still flowering as it should. He, faithful, thus
Unfolded, in propriety, the suits
That his long practising in Nature's court
Had settled with the costs. Sometimes he heard
The partridge in the spring, like a low thunder
Muffled in the wood, swell through the verdures,
And the wood-thrush chant in the green alleys,
Wherein the tough pitch-pine builds her soft bowers.
I think whate'er he found he loved; kneeling
As some dread worshipper before the shrine,
Wholly desirous to be one with God.
No summer's fire, no winter's blast, nor life
With its unnumbered sorrows for all hearts,
Not that which shuts the door to mortal thought,
Could blot away the fond belief in him,
That even through all Nature he must pass,
So having known her. She would not prove false
To one who loved her, as that poet said,
The eldest of the bards in Keswick's vale,
Who clomb Helvellyn's brow, and loved his rock.
No doubt the knowing critic must have told —
Had there been critics here (a race distract) —
That our delightful wanderer might achieve
More hopeful deeds in cities walled, and marts;
Yet shall not these crude solitudes permit
At monstrous intervals some special eye
Here interested?

To these quiet woods,
And to the ponds as still, I frequent came;
The waters, late so sparkling, now all rest,
Fast in their icy floors till Spring's warm hand
Pass o'er them, and awake their sleeping forms.
A flat and rustic landscape, loosely done;
Moist bottoms, where the rushes grow; low fields;
Swamps built on sphagnum; most of all,
The shrubby woods, late felled, with brush new-risen;
Small saplings and thin bushes, where the leaves
Hang mournful all the winter, and lament
The hopelessness of life. No stuccoed piles,
Daubed by remoter ages rich in Time,
That write the history of barbaric deeds,
Tall phantoms of the past, towering to shade
The present, mark these hollow vales; if aught,
A recent story, where the actors yet
Walk with the living, and omit the date.
But if thus homely be the novel space,
So chimes it better with the fortune plain
Of them that till the dirt, and make its plum
Their pride. They own no high achievement,
They boast no means but as their labor yields.
No pale, hereditary flame gilds here
A crown; no hives of painted lords exalt
O'er the dull bondsman, whose own name is index
Of what were farmers in the olden day, —
" Bond " meaning " farmer. "

And for me, the same,
These dells seemed like my fortunes, as the leaves
That strewed the wayside path, and 'neath my feet
Went crackling in the frost, trod under foot,
And by their living kindred left to die
Unknown, uncared for, e'en their own descent
Hating the thought to mingle with the fallen;
Left for the farmer's wagon to crush down,
Or the wild forest-fire to lick in air,
And snatch for good. In these peculiar scenes
I sometimes caught an echo of the past,
Lessons of sunk religions sounding faint:
The race was born to suffer — so shalt thou;
Was born to perish — so must thou, quickly;
And ever swift the changeful seasons walk;
The icy Boreas comes, and nips thy ears;
The furnace of July consumes the earth;
Round runs the year; and soon the years repass
With an indifferent gait.

Doth the wind
Blowing across the pasture, where the bent,
Long frozen to its core, sighs through the ice,
Survey the landscape? care if green or gray?
Or the swift partridge, o'er the withered leaves
Darting like arrows from an archer's bow,
Demand protection of the season's tooth,
Getting his fill of twigs and frozen buds,
And even the dry leaves, — things to his taste?
Or the unenvied crow, who flaps across
The frequent road, purloining light repast,
Quarrel with the north-west breeze, that mocks
His penury, and beats against his wing
With demon fury? Oft in the season
Dreary to the mind, and at its coldest hour,
A feathery drumming from some wood I hear
Of pine, behind my landscape lying far, —
A softly rolling hum, a feathery sob, —
The music of the owl, softest of sounds,
Half-buried in itself, and far beyond
All pathways that I tread, and yet a part,
Truly a fraction of the winter sum,
When every figure counts. So far from man
This sweetest owl, which human speech calls hooting;
And sometimes in my road I meet a form,
Which all the murderous crew pursue with hounds, —
I mean the slim red fox, his drooping brush
Flitting before me; and his graceful bounds
Bring back Æsop's tradition of his breed,
Giving the fox the mastery o'er the beasts.
Has sovereign Nature spared her faithful court?
The poor fox, gaunt to famine, dreads the sun,
And takes his walk at midnight to devour
Some game less wakeful. Nature is so careless!
She projects her race, then leaves it struggling:
New races hatch, and eat away its heart.
Life is at loose ends. Yet mark the titmice, —
Smallest of the tribe, mere specks of feathers,
Bits of painted quill, so delicate, a flaw
From either pole would extirpate the race:
Such little twittering mites contemn the storm.
That wintry moth I never fail to find,
And the hard snows have spiders of their own.
Let any thaw ensue, how green the plants,
That, mid the russet grass, put forth their leaves,
Spreading resigned their verdure! clovers bright,
And veiny hawkweeds, and soft, drooping ferns;
And down the brook, the wild cress moving free
Where'er the ice-chink lets the traveller's glance
Peruse the inward pages of the stream.