LOUD the wind leaps through the night and fills the valley with his wings, The bleak fields not a furlong hence, in such black hours as these, Terrify, so lonely grown; the rain sweeps down to swell the springs And beats about the happy house where I may take my ease, And beats with fury far and near The fields of loneliness and fear. In the still decline that led the blind year to his Calvary, We have walked among the woods and on a sudden heard, When not a tremor stole through air, the deadly fall from some one tree Of leaves that knew the time and answered God's unspoken word. So seems it now with me, my own Is vacant all: I must be gone. This might be that selfsame night when good King Lear was running wild Over the hoarse unglimmering heath, and glorious met the storm; His white hair had been my torch, for now I know myself beguiled By impulse nameless from the hearth, where I might huddle warm, In tooth of all the storms that ever Were, to rove the wild lands over. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE NATIONAL PAINTINGS: COL. TRUMBULL'S 'THE DECLARATION...' by FITZ-GREENE HALLECK GROWING OLD by FRANCIS LEDWIDGE THE MOCKING-BIRD by FRANK LEBBY STANTON THE SONG OF A TRAVELLER by ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON HAVE YOU PLANTED A TREE? by HENRY ABBEY |