Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SILVER FOREST, by ELEANOR M. DENNY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SILVER FOREST, by                    
First Line: How long since the red ruin ran its tongue
Last Line: A silver dream of forests long ago.
Subject(s): Mount Rainier


How long since the red ruin ran its tongue
Up your strong torsos, down your pendant arms
(Where a spiked, plumy greenness crept and clung
In beauty), till beneath the fiery harms
Writhing, they dropped in blackened mass below,
Leaving but ravage where loveliness had stood?
Tragic memorial of beauty's foe,
Bleak cenotaph to man's foolhardihood!

How long? But now against the radiant blue,
A phantom host, you lift slim, flame-stripped boles;
And, slain, a more transcendent life renew
In these upreaching, luminous white souls --
Spectral they stand against the enhaloing glow,
A silver dream of forests long ago.





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