Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE SINGER IN THE WOODS, by WILLIAM SHARP


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE SINGER IN THE WOODS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Where moongrey-thistled dunes divide the woods from the sea
Last Line: In the silence I hear my heart sobbing its old woe.
Alternate Author Name(s): Macleod, Fiona
Subject(s): Forests; Grief; Lament; Singing & Singers; Strangers; Woods; Sorrow; Sadness


Where moongrey-thistled dunes divide the woods from the sea
Sometimes a phantom drifts, like smoke, from tree to tree:
His voice is as the thin faint song when the wind wearily
Sighs in the grass, and sighing, dies: barely it comes to me.

Sometimes I hear the sighing voice along the shadowy shore;
Sometimes wave-borne it comes, as when on labouring oar
Dying men sigh once, and die, at the closing of the door
They hear below the muffled tides or the dull drowning roar.

Sometimes he passes through the caves where twilight dies;
His voice like mist from a valley then doth rise,
Or, in a windy flight of gathered sighs,
Is blown like perishing smoke against the midnight skies.

But oftenest in the dark woods I hear him sing
Dim, half-remembered things, where the old mosses cling
To the old trees, and the faint wandering eddies bring
The phantom echoes of a phantom Spring.

Lost in the dark gulf of the woods, his song sinks low:
I listen: and hear only the long, inevitable, slow
Falling of wave on wave, the sighing flow:
In the silence I hear my heart sobbing its old woe.





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