The singer in the woods

"Were Memory but a voice...."

Where moongrey-thistled dunes divide the woods from the sea

Sometimes a phantom drifts, like smoke, from tree to tree:

His voice is as the thin faint song when the wind wearily

Sighs in the grass, and sighing, dies: barely it comes to me.

Sometimes I hear the sighing voice along the shadowy shore;

Sometimes wave-borne it comes, as when on labouring oar

Dying men sigh once, and die, at the closing of the door

They hear below the muffled tides or the dull drowning roar.

Sometimes he passes through the caves where twilight dies;

His voice like mist from a valley then doth rise,

Or, in a windy flight of gathered sighs,

Is blown like perishing smoke against the midnight skies.

But oftenest in the dark woods I hear him sing

Dim, half-remembered things, where the old mosses cling

To the old trees, and the faint wandering eddies bring

The phantom echoes of a phantom Spring.

Lost in the dark gulf of the woods, his song sinks low:

I listen: and hear only the long, inevitable, slow

Falling of wave on wave, the sighing flow:

In the silence I hear my heart sobbing its old woe.