Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, WOODCRAFT, by VICTORIA MARY SACKVILLE-WEST


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

WOODCRAFT, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Their past is sure
Last Line: To vex the pigeon and to scare the jay.
Alternate Author Name(s): Nicholson, Harold, Mrs.; Sackville-west, Vita
Subject(s): Autumn; Forests; Seasons; Fall; Woods


THEIR past is sure,
Those woods deep-rooted in the swirl of time,
Temples of myth and piety and fear,
Lovely, obscure;
Dark was the ilex in the Grecian vales,
Crooked the olive, murmurous the lime.
No woodsmen but had heard the Dryad cry,
No girl but knew the goat-foot faun was nigh,
And saw the satyr through the branches leer,
And fled from those too-peopled solitudes
Into the open fields of maize and rye.
And women still have memories of woods,
Older than any personal memories;
Writhen, primeval roots, though heads be fair,
Like trees that fan the air with delicacies,
With leaves and birds among the upper air,
High, lifted canopies,
Green and black fingers of the trees, dividing
And reaching out towards an otherwhere,
Threaded with birds and birds' sweet sudden gliding,
Pattern and jargoning of tree-tops, such a world
Tangled and resonant and earth-deriding,
Now with the rain-drops' rounded globes bepearled.
And little sullen moons of mistletoe,
Now fretted with the sun, when foxes play
At fables on the dun and foxlike ground
Between the tree-trunks, and the squirrels go
Scuttering with a beechnut newly found,
To vex the pigeon and to scare the jay.





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