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Forest Sleep

Think you, lone wanderer, for an hour withdrawn
From that hot argument by human commerce bred,
Think you not the innermost forest hath foreknown
The whole narrative of the heart’s competence and need?

The boughs wear drapery of woe, their weeds
Weeping slow rain silently, the leaves
Are tears, and sunlight, tear-reflected, goads
The groundling grasses to ascend their stemmy rooves
And run to reddened heaven above the gloom—
Melodious gloom, for everywhere a flute,
Plaintive or jubilant, alike with fleeting gleam
In liquid shadow plashes a pure note.

Though every verdurous depth deny the sun,
And shaft of sun but deepen the cool shade,
And every smallest sound the stillness to adorn
With contradiction stir, harmonious abide
The forest solitudes; think you not truly, then,
The linked light and darkness, laughter and grief
Forecast the consciousness of microcosm, man,
The tuned antinomies of his mysterious life?

Howbeit, wanderer, having slaked your drought
In forest silence, eyes in greenness steeped,
To mossy stature with the knotted creepers stooped
Cede separateness, and disarm observant thought;
Take root with trees in centuries of decay,
And with their leaves inbreathe the woody fume,
From leafy drowse let individual dream
Drop with those bird-notes in a falling joy,
(Like jewels dropping into a dark well
Dug long ago amid the ligneous dust,)
And all particular dissolved to primal mist,
Whereof the Thinker fashions what he will.