The Woodman and the Nightingale

A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune

(I think such hearts yet never came to good)

Hated to hear, under the stars or moon,

One nightingale in an interfluous wood

Satiate the hungry dark with melody;—

And as a vale is watered by a flood,

Or as the moonlight fills the open sky

Struggling with darkness-as a tuberose

Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie

Like clouds above the flower from which they rose,

The singing of that happy nightingale

In this sweet forest, from the golden close

Of evening till the star of dawn may fail,

Was interfused upon the silentness;

The folded roses and the violets pale

Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss

Of heaven with all its planets; the dull ear

Of the night-cradled earth; the loneliness

Of the circumfluous waters,—every sphere

And every flower and beam and cloud and wave,

And every wind of the mute atmosphere,

And every beast stretched in its rugged cave,

And every bird lulled on its mossy bough,

And every silver moth fresh from the grave

Which is its cradle—ever from below

Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far,

To be consumed within the purest glow

Of one serene and unapproached star,

As if it were a lamp of earthly light,

Unconscious, as some human lovers are,

Itself how low, how high beyond all height

The heaven where it would perish!—and every form

That worshipped in the temple of the night

Was awed into delight, and by the charm

Girt as with an interminable zone,

Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm

Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivion

Out of their dreams; harmony became love

In every soul but one.

* * * * * * *And so this man returned with axe and saw

At evening close from killing the tall treen,

The soul of whom by Nature's gentle law

Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green

The pavement and the roof of the wild copse,

Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene

With jagged leaves,—and from the forest tops

Singing the winds to sleep—or weeping oft

Fast showers of aëreal water-drops

Into their mother's bosom, sweet and soft,

Nature's pure tears which have no bitterness;—

Around the cradles of the birds aloft

They spread themselves into the loveliness

Of fan-like leaves, and over pallid flowers

Hang like moist clouds:—or, where high branches kiss,

Make a green space among the silent bowers,

Like a vast fane in a metropolis,

Surrounded by the columns and the towers

All overwrought with branch-like traceries

In which there is religion—and the mute

Persuasion of unkindled melodies,

Odours and gleams and murmurs, which the lule

Of the blind pilot-spirit of the blast

Stirs as it sails, now grave and now acute,

Wakening the leaves and waves, ere it has passed

To such brief unison as on the brain

One tone, which never can recur, has cast,

One accent never to return again.

* * * * * * *The world is full of Woodmen who expel

Love's gentle Dryads from the haunts of life,

And vex the nightingales in every dell.