Poems (Henley)/Trees and the menace of night
XXII
Trees and the menace of night;Then a long, lonely, leaden mereBacked by a desolate fell,As by a spectral battlement; and then,Low-brooding, interpenetrating all,A vast, gray, listless, inexpressive sky,So beggared, so incredibly bereftOf starlight and the song of racing worlds,It might have bellied down upon the VoidWhere as in terror Light was beginning to be.
Hist! In the trees fulfilled of night(Night and the wretchedness of the sky)Is it the hurry of the rain?Or the noise of a drive of the Dead,Streaming before the irresistible Will Through the strange dusk of this, the Debateable LandBetween their place and ours?
Like the forgetfulnessOf the work-a-day world made visible,A mist falls from the melancholy sky.A messenger from some lost and loving soul,Hopeless, far wandered, dazedHere in the provinces of life,A great white moth fades miserably past.
Thro' the trees in the strange dead night,Under the vast dead sky,Forgetting and forgot, a drift of DeadSets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell,And the unimagined vastitudes beyond.