The wind has thrown
The boldest of trees down. 
Now disgraced it lies,
Naked in spring beneath the drifting skies,
Naked and still.

It was the wind
So furious and blind
That scourged half England through,
Ruining the fairest where most fair it grew
By dell and hill.

And springing here,
The black clouds dragging near,
Against this lonely elm
Thrust all his strength to maim and overwhelm
In one wild shock.

As in the deep
Satisfaction of dark sleep
The tree her dream dreamed on,
And woke to feel the wind’s arms round her thrown
And her head rock.

And the wind raught
Her ageing boughs and caught
Her body fast again. 
Then in one agony of age, grief, pain,
She fell and died.

Her noble height,
Branches that loved the light,
Her music and cool shade,
Her memories and all of her is dead
On the hill side.

But the wind stooped. 
With madness tired, and drooped
In the soft valley and slept. 
While morning strangely round the hush’d tree crept
And called in vain.

The birds fed where
The roots uptorn and bare
Thrust shameful at the sky;
And pewits round the tree would dip and cry
With the old pain.

“Ten o’clock’s gone!”
Said sadly every one. 
And mothers looking thought
Of sons and husbands far away that fought:—­
And looked again.

[Footnote 1:  Ten o’clock is the name of a tall tree that crowned the eastern Cotswolds.]

FROM WEAR TO THAMES

Is it because Spring now is come
That my heart leaps in its bed of dust? 
Is it with sorrow or strange pleasure
To watch the green time’s gathering treasure?

Or is there some too sharp distaste
In all this quivering green and gold? 
Something that makes bare boughs yet barer,
And the eye’s pure delight the rarer?

Not that the new found Spring is sour.... 
The blossom swings on the cherry branch,
From Wear to Thames I have seen this greenness
Cover the six-months-winter meanness.

And windflowers and yellow gillyflowers
Pierce the astonished earth with light: 
And most-loved wallflower’s bloody petal
Shakes over that long frosty battle.

But this leaping, sinking heart
Finds question in grass, bud and blossom—­
Too deeply into the earth is prying,
Too sharply hears old voices crying.

There is in blossom, bud and grass
Something that’s neither sorrow nor joy,
Something that sighs like autumn sighing,
And in each living thing is dying.

It is myself that whispers and stares
Down from the hill and in the wood,
And in the untended orchard’s shining
Sees the light through thin leaves declining.

Let me forget what I have been
What I can never be again. 
Let me forget my winter’s meanness
In this fond, flushing world of greenness.