The Leaning Elm

Before my window, in days of winter hoar     Huddled a mournful wood:     Smooth pillars of beech, domed chestnut, sycamore,     In stony sleep they stood:     But you, unhappy elm, the angry west     Had chosen from the rest,     Flung broken on your brothers' branches bare,     And left you leaning there     So dead that when the breath of winter cast     Wild snow upon the blast,     The other living branches, downward bowed,     Shook free their crystal shroud     And shed upon your blackened trunk beneath     Their livery of death....     On windless nights between the beechen bars     I watched cold stars     Throb whitely in the sky, and dreamily     Wondered if any life lay locked in thee:     If still the hidden sap secretly moved     As water in the icy winterbourne     Floweth unheard:     And half I pitied you your trance forlorn:     You could not hear, I thought, the voice of any bird,     The shadowy cries of bats in dim twilight     Or cool voices of owls crying by night ...     Hunting by night under the hornd moon:     Yet half I envied you your wintry swoon,     Till, on this morning mild, the sun, new-risen     Steals from his misty prison;     The frozen fallows glow, the black trees shaken     In a clear flood of sunlight vibrating awaken:     And lo, your ravaged bole, beyond belief     Slenderly fledged anew with tender leaf     As pale as those twin vanes that break at last     In a tiny fan above the black beech-mast     Where no blade springeth green     But pallid bells of the shy helleborine.     What is this ecstasy that overwhelms     The dreaming earth? See, the embrownd elms     Crowding purple distances warm the depths of the wood:     A new-born wind tosses their tassels brown,     His white clouds dapple the down:     Into a green flame bursting the hedgerows stand.     Soon, with banners flying, Spring will walk the land....     There is no day for thee, my soul, like this,     No spring of lovely words. Nay, even the kiss     Of mortal love that maketh man divine     This light cannot outshine:     Nay, even poets, they whose frail hands catch     The shadow of vanishing beauty, may not match     This leafy ecstasy. Sweet words may cull     Such magical beauty as time may not destroy;     But we, alas, are not more beautiful:     We cannot flower in beauty as in joy.     We sing, our musd words are sped, and then     Poets are only men     Who age, and toil, and sicken.... This maim'd tree     May stand in leaf when I have ceased to be.