Chapter V

The tumult and the booming of the trees,
Shaken with shoutings of the winds of March--
No mightier music have I heard than these,--
The rocking and the rushing of the trees,
The organ-thunder of the forest’s arch.
And in the wind their columned trunks become,
Each one, a mighty pendulum,
Swayed to and fro as if in time
To some vast song, some roaring rhyme,
Wind-shouted from sonorous hill to hill.
The woods are never still:
The dead leaves frenzy by,
Innumerable and frantic as the dance
That whirled its madness once beneath the sky
In ancient Greece,--like withered Corybants:
And I am caught and carried with their rush,
Their countless panic--borne away,
A brother to the wind, through the deep gray
Of the old beech-wood, where the wild March-day
Sits dreaming, filling all the boisterous hush
With murmurous laughter and swift smiles of sun;
Conspiring in its heart and plotting how
To load with leaves and blossoms every bough,
And whispering to itself, “Now Spring’s begun!
And soon her flowers shall golden through these leaves!--
Away, ye sightless things and sere!
Make room for that which shall appear!
The glory and the gladness of the year;
The loveliness my eye alone perceives,--
Still hidden there beneath the covering leaves,--
My song shall waken!--flowers, that this floor
Of whispering woodland soon shall carpet o’er
For my sweet sisters’ feet to tread upon,
Months kinder than myself, the stern and strong,
Tempestuous-loving one,
Whose soul is full of wild, tumultuous song,
And whose rough hand now thrusts itself among
The dead leaves; groping for the flowers that lie
Huddled beneath, each like a sleep-closed eye:
Gold adder’s-tongue and pink
Oxalis; snow-pale bloodroot blooms;
May-apple hoods, that parasol the brink,
Screening their moons, of the slim woodland-stream:
And the wild iris; trillium,--white as stars,--
And bluebells, dream on dream:
With harsh hand groping in the glooms,
I grasp their slenderness and shake
Their lovely eyes awake,
Dispelling from their souls the sleep that mars;
With heart-disturbing jars
Clasping their forms, and with rude finger-tips,
Through the dark rain that drips
Lifting them shrinking to my stormy lips.

VI

“Already spicewood and the sassafras,
Like fragrant flames, begin
To tuft their boughs with topaz, ere they spin
Their beryl canopies--a glimmering mass,
Mist-blurred, above the deepening grass.
Already where the old beech stands
Clutching the lean soil as it were with hands
Taloned and twisted,--on its trunk a knot,
A huge excrescence, a great fungous clot,
Like some enormous and distorting wart,--
My eyes can see how, blot on beautiful blot
Of blue, the violets blur through
The musky and the loamy rot
Of leaf-pierced leaves; and, heaven in their hue,
A sunbeam at each blossom’s heart,
The little bluets, crew on azure crew,
Prepare their myriads for invasion too.