There is a spot in the woods
That is “forever England” to me.
A clump of beech trees
Steeped in silence,
Whose shade and solitude
Shuts me in with my dreams.
The sunshine slants through
Their limpid leaves
And turns them to translucent jade,
Just as it does in an English spring.
Violets are there, and I pluck them,
Remembering the bluebells
In the beech wood
At Sevenoaks.
Aloofness
Down among the docks and elevators and railroad tracks
On the way out of the city,
I pass a tiny cottage so rickety
That its neighbors crowd close
To hold it up. But there it is,
Its one window shining clean, and glowing
With a plant in a tin can and pure white curtains.
Hanging over the fence and filling the whole place
With its beauty and almost hiding the cottage
Is a peach tree in full bloom.
In the doorway I glimpse a girl
In a purple dress.
But what matters the smoke and the noise and the fog
To the peach tree?
Listening
(Eden, N. Y.)
Atop Aries hill am I,
The lone flyer, throbbing
Against the sunset
Is higher.
He sees more than I,
But he cannot hear
What I hear.
I hear the wood-thrush
And the veery,
Answer each other.
I hear the voices
Of happy children
And the baying of hounds
Float up from the valley;
The chirp of the cricket
At my feet, and, then,
The silence of nightfall.
He sees more than I,
But he cannot hear
What I hear.