| |
| THE OAKS are doomed in pleasant Warlock Woods; | |
| Soon they ’ll come crashing through the hazel copse; | |
| Already rocking like poor wind-tossed ships, | |
| I see their reeling spars and waving tops. | |
| |
| Shipwrecked indeed: the old estate is gone; | 5 |
| The knights have yielded to King Mammon’s lords; | |
| Rent is the good escutcheon,—sable, gules; | |
| Shivered at last the brave Crusaders’ swords. | |
| |
| Soon barked and bare, the oak-trees’ giant limbs | |
| Will strew the covert, all o’ergrown with fern: | 10 |
| I hear the jarring axe that cleaves and splits; | |
| I see the woodmen’s fires that crackling burn. | |
| |
| ’T would be a dismal sight in winter-time, | |
| When boughs are snapped, and branches tempest-cleft, | |
| When dead leaves drift across the rainy skies, | 15 |
| And not a wayside flower of hope is left. | |
| |
| How much more mournful now in sunny air, | |
| When hyacinths in shade grow blue and rank, | |
| When echoing cuckoos greet the spring again, | |
| And violets purple every primrose bank. | 20 |
| |
| Here has the flying rebel cowering hid, | |
| Waiting the footfall and the pitying eyes; | |
| And here, with sullen psalms and gloomy prayers, | |
| The Ironsides have doled their prophecies. | |
| |
| And here the outlaws, in the Norman time, | 25 |
| Strung their big bows, and filed their arrow-heads, | |
| While the wine-jug went round so fierce and fast, | |
| When near them lay the fallow-deer just dead. | |
| |
| These trees have heard full many a parting kiss, | |
| The suicide’s last prayer, the lover’s sigh, | 30 |
| The murdered one’s wild scream: it is for this | |
| I hold them bound to man in sympathy. | |
| |
| The oak woods pay for many a spendthrift’s fault; | |
| Old giants, centuries long without a fear, | |
| Fall prostrate at one scornful tap from thee, | 35 |
| Frail ivory hammer of the auctioneer. | |
| |
| “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” | |
| No more to be the homes of hawk or owl; | |
| No more on stormy nights the banshee wind | |
| Shall through thy riven branches gasp and howl. | 40 |
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