Now thick as stars leaves shake within the dome
Of faintly-glinting dusking monochrome;
And stars thick hung as leaves shake unseen in the round
Of darkening blue:  the heavenly branches wave without a sound,
Only betrayed by fine vibration of thin air. 
Gleam now the nearer stars and ghosts of farther stars that bare,
Trembling and gradual, brightness everywhere.... 
When leaves fall wildly and your beechen dome is thinned,
Showered glittering down under the sudden wind;
And when you, crowded stars, are shaken from your tree
In time’s late season stripped, and each bough nakedly
Rocks in those gleamless shallows of infinity;
When star-fall follows leaf-fall, will long Winter pass away
And new stars as new leaves dance through their hasty May? 
—­But as a leaf falls so falls weightless thought
Eddying, and with a myriad dead leaves lies
Bewildered, or in a little air awhile is caught
Idly, then drops and dies.

Look at the stars, the stars!  But in this wood
All I can understand is understood. 
Gentler than stars your beeches speak; I hear
Syllables more simple and intimately clear
To earth-taught sense, than the heaven-singing word
Of that intemperate wisdom which the sky
Shakes down upon each unregarding century,
There lying like snow unstirred,
Unmelting, on the loftiest peak
Above our human and green valley ways. 
Lowlier and friendlier your beechen branches speak
To men of mortal days
With hearts too fond, too weak
For solitude or converse with that starry race. 
Their shaken lights,
Their lonely splendours and uncomprehended
Dream-distance and long circlings ’mid the heights
And deeps remotely neighboured and attended
By spheres that spill their fire through these estranging nights:—­
Ah, were they less dismaying, or less splendid! 
But as one deaf and mute sees the lips shape
And quiver as men talk, or marks the throat
Of rising song that he can never hear,
Though in the singer’s eyes her joy may dimly peer,
And song and word his hopeless sense escape—­
Sweet common word and lifted heavenly note—­
So, beneath that bright rain,
While stars rise, soar and stoop,
Dazzled and dismayed I look and droop
And, blinded, look again.

“Return, return!” O beeches sing you then. 
I like a tree wave all my thoughts with you,
As your boughs wave to other tossed boughs when
First in the windy east the dawn looks through
Night’s soon-dissolving bars. 
Return, return?  But I have never strayed: 
Hush, thoughts, that for a moment played
In that enchanted forest of the stars
Where the mind grows numb. 
Return, return? 
Back, thoughts, from heights that freeze and deeps that burn,
Where sight fails and song’s dumb. 
And as, after long absence, a child stands
In each familiar room
And with fond hands