| |
| BRIAR and fennel and chincapin, | |
| And rue and ragweed everywhere; | |
| The field seemed sick as a soul with sin, | |
| Or dead of an old despair, | |
| Born of an ancient care. | 5 |
| |
| The cricket’s cry and the locust’s whirr, | |
| And the note of a bird’s distress, | |
| With the rasping sound of the grasshopper, | |
| Clung to the loneliness | |
| Like burrs to a trailing dress. | 10 |
| |
| So sad the field, so waste the ground, | |
| So curst with an old despair, | |
| A woodchuck’s burrow, a blind mole’s mound, | |
| And a chipmunk’s stony lair, | |
| Seemed more than it could bear. | 15 |
| |
| So lonely, too, so more than sad, | |
| So droning-lone with bees— | |
| I wondered what more could Nature add | |
| To the sum of its miseries … | |
| And then—I saw the trees. | 20 |
| |
| Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place, | |
| Twisted and torn they rose— | |
| The tortured bones of a perished race | |
| Of monsters no mortal knows, | |
| They startled the mind’s repose. | 25 |
| |
| And a man stood there, as still as moss, | |
| A lichen form that stared; | |
| With an old blind hound that, at a loss, | |
| Forever around him fared | |
| With a snarling fang half bared. | 30 |
| |
| I looked at the man; I saw him plain; | |
| Like a dead weed, gray and wan, | |
| Or a breath of dust. I looked again— | |
| And man and dog were gone, | |
| Like wisps of the graying dawn…. | 35 |
| |
| Were they a part of the grim death there— | |
| Ragweed, fennel, and rue? | |
| Or forms of the mind, an old despair, | |
| That there into semblance grew | |
| Out of the grief I knew? | 40 |
| |
