The Voice in the Wild Oak
(Written in the shadow of 1872.)
Twelve years ago, when I could faceHigh heaven’s dome with different eyes—In days full-flowered with hours of grace,And nights not sad with sighs—I wrote a song in which I stroveTo shadow forth thy strain of woe,Dark widowed sister of the grove!—Twelve wasted years ago.
But youth was then too young to findThose high authentic syllables,Whose voice is like the wintering windBy sunless mountain fells;Nor had I sinned and suffered thenTo that superlative degreeThat I would rather seek, than men,Wild fellowship with thee!
But he who hears this autumn dayThy more than deep autumnal rhyme,Is one whose hair was shot with greyBy Grief instead of Time.He has no need, like many a bard,To sing imaginary pain,Because he bears, and finds it hard,The punishment of Cain.
No more he sees the affluenceWhich makes the heart of Nature glad;For he has lost the fine, first senseOf Beauty that he had.The old delight God’s happy breezeWas wont to give, to Grief has grown;And therefore, Niobe of trees,His song is like thine own!
But I, who am that perished soul,Have wasted so these powers of mine,That I can never write that whole,Pure, perfect speech of thine.Some lord of words august, supreme,The grave, grand melody demands;The dark translation of thy themeI leave to other hands.
Yet here, where plovers nightly callAcross dim, melancholy leas—Where comes by whistling fen and fallThe moan of far-off seas—A grey, old Fancy often sitsBeneath thy shade with tired wings,And fills thy strong, strange rhyme by fitsWith awful utterings.
Then times there are when all the wordsAre like the sentences of oneShut in by Fate from wind and birdsAnd light of stars and sun,No dazzling dryad, but a darkDream-haunted spirit doomed to beImprisoned, crampt in bands of bark,For all eternity.
Yea, like the speech of one aghastAt Immortality in chains,What time the lordly storm rides pastWith flames and arrowy rains:Some wan Tithonus of the wood,White with immeasurable years—An awful ghost in solitudeWith moaning moors and meres.
And when high thunder smites the hillAnd hunts the wild dog to his den,Thy cries, like maledictions, shrillAnd shriek from glen to glen,As if a frightful memory whippedThy soul for some infernal crimeThat left it blasted, blind, and stript—A dread to Death and Time!
But when the fair-haired August dies,And flowers wax strong and beautiful,Thy songs are stately harmoniesBy wood-lights green and cool—Most like the voice of one who showsThrough sufferings fierce, in fine relief,A noble patience and repose—A dignity in grief.
But, ah! conceptions fade away,And still the life that lives in thee—The soul of thy majestic lay—Remains a mystery!And he must speak the speech divine—The language of the high-throned lords—Who’d give that grand old theme of thineIts sense in faultless words.
By hollow lands and sea-tracts harsh,With ruin of the fourfold gale,Where sighs the sedge and sobs the marsh,Still wail thy lonely wail;And, year by year, one step will breakThe sleep of far hill-folded streams,And seek, if only for thy sakeThy home of many dreams.