The Voice in the Wild Oak

(Written in the shadow of 1872.)     Twelve years ago, when I could face     High heavens 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 strove     To shadow forth thy strain of woe,     Dark widowed sister of the grove!     Twelve wasted years ago.     But youth was then too young to find     Those high authentic syllables,     Whose voice is like the wintering wind     By sunless mountain fells;     Nor had I sinned and suffered then     To that superlative degree     That I would rather seek, than men,     Wild fellowship with thee!     But he who hears this autumn day     Thy more than deep autumnal rhyme,     Is one whose hair was shot with grey     By 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 affluence     Which makes the heart of Nature glad;     For he has lost the fine, first sense     Of Beauty that he had.     The old delight Gods happy breeze     Was 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 theme     I leave to other hands.     Yet here, where plovers nightly call     Across dim, melancholy leas     Where comes by whistling fen and fall     The moan of far-off seas     A grey, old Fancy often sits      And fills thy strong, strange rhyme by fits     With awful utterings.     Then times there are when all the words     Are like the sentences of one     Shut in by Fate from wind and birds     And light of stars and sun,     No dazzling dryad, but a dark     Dream-haunted spirit doomed to be     Imprisoned, crampt in bands of bark,     For all eternity.     Yea, like the speech of one aghast     At Immortality in chains,     What time the lordly storm rides past     With flames and arrowy rains:     Some wan Tithonus of the wood,     White with immeasurable years     An awful ghost in solitude     With moaning moors and meres.     And when high thunder smites the hill     And hunts the wild dog to his den,     Thy cries, like maledictions, shrill     And shriek from glen to glen,     As if a frightful memory whipped     Thy soul for some infernal crime     That 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 harmonies     By wood-lights green and cool     Most like the voice of one who shows     Through 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     Whod give that grand old theme of thine     Its 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 break     The sleep of far hill-folded streams,     And seek, if only for thy sake     Thy home of many dreams.