The happy tree

There was a bright and happy tree;

The wind with music laced its boughs:

Thither across the houseless sea

Came singing birds to house.

Men grudged the tree its happy eves,

Its happy dawns of eager sound;

So all that crown and tower of leaves

They levelled with the ground.

They made an upright of the stem,

A cross-piece of a bough they made:

No shadow of their deed on them

The fallen branches laid.

But blithely, since the year was young,

When they a fitting hill did find,

There on the happy tree they hung

The Saviour of mankind.