Look at the stars, the stars? But in this wood
All I can understand is understood.
Gentler than stars your beeches speak; I hear
Syllables more simple and intimately clear
To earth-taught sense, than the heaven-singing word
Of that intemperate wisdom which the sky
Shakes down upon each unregarding century,
There lying like snow unstirred,
Unmelting, on the loftiest peak
Above our human and green valley ways.
Lowlier and friendlier your beechen branches speak
To men of mortal days
With hearts too fond, too weak
For solitude or converse with that starry race.
Their shaken lights,
Their lonely splendours and uncomprehended
Dream-distance and long circlings 'mid the heights
And deeps remotely neighboured and attended
By spheres that spill their fire through these estranging nights:—
Ah, were they less dismaying, or less splendid!
But as one deaf and mute sees the lips shape
And quiver as men talk, or marks the throat
Of rising song that he can never hear,
Though in the singer's eyes her joy may dimly peer,
And song and word his hopeless sense escape—
Sweet common word and lifted heavenly note—
So, beneath that bright rain,
While stars rise, soar, and stoop,
Dazzled and dismayed I look and droop
And, blinded, look again.
"Return, return!" O beeches sing you then.
I like a tree wave all my thoughts with you,
As your boughs wave to other tossed boughs when
First in the windy east the dawn looks through
Night's soon-dissolving bars.
Return, return? But I have never strayed:
Hush, thoughts, that for a moment played
In that enchanted forest of the stars
Where the mind grows numb.
Return, return?
Back, thoughts, from heights that freeze and deeps that burn,
Where sight fails and song's dumb.
And as, after long absence, a child stands
In each familiar room
And with fond hands
Touches the table, casement, bed,
Anon, each sleeping, half-forgotten toy;
So I to your sharp light and friendly gloom
Returning, with first pale leaves round me shed,
Recover the old joy
Since here the long-acquainted hill-path lies,
Steeps I have clambered up, and spaces where
The Mount opens her bosom to the air
And all around gigantic beeches rise.
JOHN FREEMAN
Shobeensho
(From the Irish Gaelic)
For my Granddaughter Jenny
O not as the wife of a churl would wrap you,
In coarse country woollens so roughly to hap you;
Between two sheets of the silk I'll lay you,
A cradle of gold in the wind to sway you.
I'd rock you to rest, my bright new-comer,
One dreamy day in the height of summer,
Under the eaves of whispering leaves,
Drowsed by the drone of the wee bee-drummer.
May a dream of delight steal into your slumber;
Till evening makes way for the Starry Number,
And with God's bright angels around to mind you,
No finger of death I pray may find you!