Trees And The Menace Of Night
William Ernest Henley 1849 (Gloucester) – 1903 (Woking)
Trees and the menace of night;
Then a long, lonely, leaden mere
Backed by a desolate fell,
As by a spectral battlement; and then,
Low-brooding, interpenetrating all,
A vast, gray, listless, inexpressive sky,
So beggared, so incredibly bereft
Of starlight and the song of racing worlds,
It might have bellied down upon the Void
Where as in terror Light was beginning to be.
Hist! In the trees fulfilled of night
(Night and the wretchedness of the sky)
Is it the hurry of the rain?
Or the noise of a drive of the Dead,
Streaming before the irresistible Will
Through the strange dusk of this, the Debateable Land
Between their place and ours?
Like the forgetfulness
Of the work-a-day world made visible,
A mist falls from the melancholy sky.
A messenger from some lost and loving soul,
Hopeless, far wandered, dazed
Here in the provinces of life,
A great white moth fades miserably past.
Thro' the trees in the strange dead night,
Under the vast dead sky,
Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead
Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell,
And the unimagined vastitudes beyond.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 56 sec read
- 116 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | AXBXXCXDXX ACXEXXX DXCXXXX ACEBX |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,052 |
Words | 188 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 10, 7, 7, 5 |
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"Trees And The Menace Of Night" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 14 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/40573/trees-and-the-menace-of-night>.
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