Nature and Elements

I have been one acquainted with the night.

Tree at my window, window tree, My sash is lowered when night comes on; But let there never be curtain drawn Between you and me.

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near.

The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.

Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.

Slowly, silently, now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon.

Who said “Peacock Pie”? The old king to the sparrow: Who said “Crops are ripe”? Rust to the harrow.

When people call this beast to mind, They marvel more and more At such a little tail behind, So large a trunk before.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.

Down the mountain walls From where Pan’s cavern is Intolerable music falls. Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam.

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit.

The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’ song After great cathedral gong.

That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.

If there’s no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old.

Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.