Wasteland

Briar and fennel and chinquapin,     And rue and ragweed everywhere;     The field seemed sick as a soul with sin,     Or dead of an old despair,     Born of an ancient care.     The cricket's cry and the locust's whirr,     And the note of a bird's distress,     With the rasping sound of a grasshoppr,     Clung to the loneliness     Like burrs to a ragged dress.     So sad the field, so waste the ground,     So curst with an old despair,     A woodchuck's burrow, a blind mole's mound,     And a chipmunk's stony lair,     Seemed more than it could bear.     So solemn too, so more than sad,     So droning-lone with bees     I wondered what more could Nature add     To the sum of its miseries     And then I saw the trees.     Skeletons gaunt, that gnarled the place,     Twisted and torn they rose,     The tortured bones of a perished race     Of monsters no mortal knows.     They startled the mind's repose.     And a man stood there, as still as moss,     A lichen form that stared;     And an old blind hound, that seemed at loss,     Forever around him fared     With a snarling fang half-bared.     I looked at the man. I saw him plain.     Like a dead weed, gray and wan,     Or a breath of dust. I looked again     And man and dog were gone     Like wisps o' the graying dawn. . . .     Were they a part of the grim death'there?     Ragweed, fennel, and rue?     Or forms of the mind, an old despair,     That there into semblance grew     Out of the grief I knew?