Page:Poems Rossetti.djvu/415

AN OLD-WORLD THICKET.

. . . "Una selva oscura."—Dante.

AWAKE or sleeping (for I know not which)
 I was or was not mazed within a wood
Where every mother-bird brought up her brood
 Safe in some leafy niche
Of oak or ash, of cypress or of beech,

Of silvery aspen trembling delicately,
 Of plane or warmer-tinted sycomore,
 Of elm that dies in secret from the core,
  Of ivy weak and free,
 Of pines, of all green lofty things that be.

Such birds they seemed as challenged each desire;
 Like spots of azure heaven upon the wing,
 Like downy emeralds that alight and sing,
  Like actual coals on fire,
 Like anything they seemed, and everything.

Such mirth they made, such warblings and such chat
 With tongue of music in a well-tuned beak,
 They seemed to speak more wisdom than we speak,
  To make our music flat
 And all our subtlest reasonings wild or weak.