A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919/Songs from an Evil Wood
SONGS FROM AN EVIL WOOD
I
THERE is no wrath in the stars,
They do not rage in the sky;
I look from the evil wood
And find myself wondering why.
Why do they not scream out
And grapple star against star,
Seeking for blood in the wood
As all things round me are?
They do not glare like the sky
Or flash like the deeps of the wood;
But they shine softly on
In their sacred solitude.
To their high, happy haunts
Silence from us has flown,
She whom we loved of old
And know it now she is gone.
When will she come again,
Though for one second only?
She whom we loved is gone
And the whole world is lonely.
II
Somewhere lost in the haze
The sun goes down in the cold,
And birds in this evil wood
Chirrup home as of old;
Chirrup, stir and are still
On the high twigs frozen and thin.
There is no more noise of them now,
And the long night sets in.
Of all the wonderful things
That I have seen in the wood,
I marvel most at the birds
And their wonderful quietude.
For a giant smites with his club
All day the tops of the hill,
Sometimes he rests at night,
Oftener he beats them still.
And a dwarf with a grim black mane
Raps with repeated rage
All night in the valley below
On the wooden walls of his cage.
And the elder giants come
Sometimes, tramping from far
Through the weird and flickering light
Made by an earthly star.
And the giant with his club,
And the dwarf with rage in his breath,
And the elder giants from far,
They are all the children of Death.
They are all abroad to-night
And are breaking the hills with their brood,
And the birds are all asleep
Even in Plug Street Wood!
III
The great guns of England, they listen mile on mile
To the boasts of a broken War-Lord; they lift their throats and smile;
But the old woods are fallen
For a while.
The old woods are fallen; yet will they come again,
They will come back some springtime with the warm winds and the rain,
For Nature guardeth her children
Never in vain.
They will come back some season; it may be a hundred years;
It is all one to Nature with the centuries that are hers;
She shall bring back her children
And dry all their tears.
But the tears of a would-be War-Lord shall never cease to flow,
He shall weep for the poisoned armies whenever the gas-winds blow,
He shall always weep for his widows,
And all Hell shall know.
The tears of a pitiless Kaiser shallow they'll flow and wide,
Wide as the desolation made by his silly pride
When he slaughtered a little people
To stab France in her side.
Over the ragged cinders they shall flow and on and on
With the listless falling of streams that find not Oblivion,
For ages and ages of years
Till the last star is gone.
IV
I met with Death in his country,
With his scythe and his hollow eye,
Walking the roads of Belgium.
I looked and he passed me by.
Since he passed me by in Plug Street,
In the wood of the evil name,
I shall not now lie with the heroes,
I shall not share their fame,
I shall never be as they are,
A name in the lands of the Free,
Since I looked on Death in Flanders
And he did not look at me.