The
Dryad
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HER soul
was sown with the seed of the
tree
Of old when the earth
was young,
And glad with the light of its majesty
The light of her beautiful
being upgrew.
And the winds that swept over land and sea,
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And
like a harper the great boughs strung,
Whispered her all
things new.
The tree reached forth to the sun and the wind
And towered to heaven
above.
But she was the soul that under its rind
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Whispered its
joy through the whole wood’s
span,
Sweet and glad and tender and kind;
For her love for the
tree was a holier love
Than the love of woman
for man.
The seasons came and the seasons went
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And
the woodland music rang;
And under her wide umbrageous tent,
Hidden forever from
mortal eye,
She sang earth’s beauty and wonderment.
But men never knew
the spirit that sang
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This
music too wondrous to die.
Only nature, forever young,
And her children,
forever true,
Knew the beauty of her who sung
And her tender, glad
love for the tree;
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Till
on her music the wild hawk hung
From his eyrie high
in the blue
To drink her melody
free.
And the creatures of earth would creep from their
haunts
To stare with their
wilding eyes,
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To hearken
those rhythms of earth’s romance,
That never the ear
of mortal hath heard;
Till the elfin squirrels would caper and dance,
And the hedgehog’s sleepy
and shy surprise
Would grow to the
thought of a bird.
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And the pale wood-flowers from their cradles of
dew
Where they rocked
them the whole night long,
While the dark wheeled round and the stars looked
through
Into the great wood’s
slumbrous breast,
Till the gray of the night like a mist outblew;
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Hearkened
the piercing joy of her song
That sank like a star
in their rest.
But all things come to an end at last
When the wings of
being are furled.
And there blew one night a maddening blast
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From
those wastes where ships dismantle and drown,
That ravaged the forest and thundered past;
And in the wreck of
that ruined world
The dryad’s
tree went down.
When the pale stars dimmed their tapers of gold,
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And
over the night’s round rim
The day rose sullen and ragged and cold,
Over that wind-swept,
desolate wild,
Where the huge trunks lay like giants of old,
Prone, slain on some
battlefield, silent and grim;
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The
wood-creatures, curious, mild,
Searching their solitudes, found her there
Like a snowdrift out
in the morn;
One lily are round the beech-trunk bare,
One curved, cold,
under her elfin head,
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With
the beechen shine in her nut-brown hair,
And the pallor of
dawn on her face, love-lorn,
Beautiful, passionless,
dead.
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