Classic and Contemporary Poetry
DEATH AMONG THE TREES, by LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: Death walketh in the forest Last Line: Soften to his sad heart the thought of death. Subject(s): Trees | ||||||||
DEATH walketh in the forest. The tall pines Do woo the lightning-flash, and through their veins The fire-shaft, darting, leaves their blackened trunks A tablet, for ambition's sons to read Their destiny. The oak that centuries spared, Grows gray at last, and, like some time-worn man Stretching out palsied arms, doth feebly cope With the destroyer, while its gnarled roots Betray their trust. The towering elm turns pale, And faintly strews the sere and yellow leaf, While from its dead arms falls the wedded vine. The sycamore uplifts a beacon brow, Denuded of its honors, and the blast, Swaying the withered willow, rudely asks For its lost grace, and for its tissued leaf, With silver lined. I knew that blight might check The sapling, ere kind Nature's hand could weave Its first spring-coronal, and that the worm, Coiling itself amid our garden plants, Did make their unborn buds its sepulchre. And well I know how wild and wrecking winds Might take the forest-monarchs by the crown, And lay them with the lowliest vassal-herb; And that the axe, with its sharp ministry, Might, in one hour, such revolution work, As all Earth's boasted power could never hope To reinstate. And I had seen the flame Go crackling up, amid you verdant boughts, And with a tyrant's insolence dissolve Their interlacing, till I felt that man, For sordid gain, would make the forest's pomp, Its heaven-raised arch and living tracery, One funeral-pyre. But, yet I did not deem That pale Disease amid those shades would steal As to a sickly maiden's cheek, and waste The power and plenitude of those high ranks, Which in their peerage and nobility, Unrivalled and unchronicled, had reigned. And so I said, if in this world of knells And open tombs, there lingereth one whose dream Is of aught permanent below the skies, Even let him come and muse among the trees, For they shall be his teachers; they shall bow To Wisdom's lessons his forgetful ear, And, by the whisper of their faded leaves, Soften to his sad heart the thought of death. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE PROBLEM OF DESCRIBING TREES by ROBERT HASS THE GREEN CHRIST by ANDREW HUDGINS MIDNIGHT EDEN by JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN REFLECTION OF THE WOOD by LEONIE ADAMS THE LIFE OF TREES by DORIANNE LAUX COLUMBUS [JANUARY, 1487] by LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY |
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