Trees and the menace of night; <br />Then a long, lonely, leaden mere <br />Backed by a desolate fell, <br />As by a spectral battlement; and then, <br />Low-brooding, interpenetrating all, <br />A vast, gray, listless, inexpressive sky, <br />So beggared, so incredibly bereft <br />Of starlight and the song of racing worlds, <br />It might have bellied down upon the Void <br />Where as in terror Light was beginning to be. <br /> <br />Hist! In the trees fulfilled of night <br />(Night and the wretchedness of the sky) <br />Is it the hurry of the rain? <br />Or the noise of a drive of the Dead, <br />Streaming before the irresistible Will <br />Through the strange dusk of this, the Debateable Land <br />Between their place and ours? <br /> <br />Like the forgetfulness <br />Of the work-a-day world made visible, <br />A mist falls from the melancholy sky. <br />A messenger from some lost and loving soul, <br />Hopeless, far wandered, dazed <br />Here in the provinces of life, <br />A great white moth fades miserably past. <br /> <br />Thro' the trees in the strange dead night, <br />Under the vast dead sky, <br />Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead <br />Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell, <br />And the unimagined vastitudes beyond.<br /><br />William Ernest Henley<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/trees-and-the-menace-of-night/
