Zinzendorff and Other Poems/Death among the Trees
DEATH AMONG THE TREES.
Death walketh in the forest.
The tall pines
Do woo the lightning-flash, and through their veins
The fire-cup, darting, leaves their blackened trunks
A tablet, for ambition's sons to read
Their destiny. The oak, that centuries spared,
Grows grey at last, and like some time-worn man
Stretching out palsied arms, doth feebly cope
With the destroyer, while its gnarled roots
Betray their trust. The towering elm turns pale,
And faintly strews the sere and yellow leaf,
While from its dead arms falls the wedded vine.
The sycamore uplifts a beacon brow,
Denuded of its honors, and the blast,
Swaying the withered willow, rudely asks
For its lost grace, and for its tissued leaf,
With silver lined.
I knew that blight might check
The sapling, ere kind Nature's hand could weave
Its first spring-coronal, and that the worm,
Coiling itself amid our garden-plants,
Did make their unborn buds its sepulchre.
And well I knew how wild and wrecking winds
Might take the forest-monarchs by the crown,
And lay them with the lowliest vassal-herb;
And that the axe, with its sharp ministry,
Might, in one hour, such revolution work,
As all Earth's boasted power could never hope
To re-instate. And I had seen the flame
Go crackling up, amid yon verdant boughs,
And with a tyrant's insolence dissolve
Their interlacing, till I felt that man,
For sordid gain would make the forest's pomp
Its heaven-raised arch and living tracery,
One funeral-pyre.
But, yet I did not deem
That pale Disease amid those shades would steal
As to a sickly maiden's cheek, and waste
The power and plenitude of those high ranks,
Which in their peerage and nobility,
Unrivalled and unchronicled, had reigned.
And so I said if in this world of knells
And open tombs, there lingereth one whose dream
Is of aught permanent below the skies,
Even let him come and muse among the trees,
For they shall be his teachers; they shall bow
To Wisdom's lessons his forgetful ear,
And, by the whisper of their faded leaves,
Soften to his sad heart the thought of death.