THEIR past is sure, Those woods deep-rooted in the swirl of time, Temples of myth and piety and fear, Lovely, obscure; Dark was the ilex in the Grecian vales, Crooked the olive, murmurous the lime. No woodsmen but had heard the Dryad cry, No girl but knew the goat-foot faun was nigh, And saw the satyr through the branches leer, And fled from those too-peopled solitudes Into the open fields of maize and rye. And women still have memories of woods, Older than any personal memories; Writhen, primeval roots, though heads be fair, Like trees that fan the air with delicacies, With leaves and birds among the upper air, High, lifted canopies, Green and black fingers of the trees, dividing And reaching out towards an otherwhere, Threaded with birds and birds' sweet sudden gliding, Pattern and jargoning of tree-tops, such a world Tangled and resonant and earth-deriding, Now with the rain-drops' rounded globes bepearled. And little sullen moons of mistletoe, Now fretted with the sun, when foxes play At fables on the dun and foxlike ground Between the tree-trunks, and the squirrels go Scuttering with a beechnut newly found, To vex the pigeon and to scare the jay. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...NATIONAL ODE; INDEPENDENCE SQUARE, PHILADELPHIA by BAYARD TAYLOR AT ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING by CHARLES BAUDELAIRE MANIAC'S SONG by JOHN GARDINER CALKINS BRAINARD THE BATTLE OF LANGSIDE by JOHN BROWN (1810-1882) THE PRIZE OF THE MARGARETTA by WILLIAM MCKENDREE CARLETON FOUR METRICAL EXPERIMENTS: 4. PINDARIC by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE |