For deeper in the heart of things,
And older far than time,
Its roots are fixed in those sure deeps
From which the centuries climb.
Ages ago its girth was great;
Its boughs o’er earth’s wide lands;
All peoples gathered ’neath its glades
Where now old ruin stands.
But form and custom staled its green
And curbed it into bounds
Of pruning hooks and greedy walls
That hemmed its sacred rounds.
And vast and wide where once to all
Its radiant leaves were free,
Far peoples paid, with earth’s red gold,
Its sacred home to see.
And summer by summer, yea, year by year,
Still lower shrank its head,
Till shallow deceit and life’s despair
Declared its heart was dead.
Then men cried, “We will hew it down,
And build from out its wood
A temple rare wherein to teach
Us memory of its good.
“And ’neath its shelter we will keep,
To hold the ages’ youth,
Those holy dreams our fathers drew
From out the tree of truth.”
They hacked and hewed, they sawed and planed,
They lopped its branches wide,
Till shorn and bare the old tree stood
To every wind and tide.
And round its scathed and ruined trunk,
Whence life had fled aloof,
They built a temple carved and arched
From floor to groinèd roof.
And reared a shrine where art was all
The end of human pain,
Till a sprout shot forth from the old tree’s trunk
And burst its walls amain;