The Revelator

Bri­ar and fen­nel and chinquapin,
And rue and rag­weed everywhere;
The field seemed sick as a soul with sin,
Or dead of an old despair,
Born of an ancient care.

The crick­et’s cry and the locust’s whirr,
And the note of a bird’s distress,
With the rasp­ing sound of a grasshopper,
Clung to the loneliness
Like burrs to a ragged dress.

So sad the field, so waste the ground,
So curst with an old despair,
A wood­chuck­’s bur­row, a blind mole’s mound,
And a chip­munk’s stony lair,
Seemed more than it could bear.

So solemn too, so more than sad,
So dron­ing-lone with bees—
I won­dered what more could Nature add
To the sum of its miseries
And then I saw the trees.

Skele­tons gaunt, that gnarled the place,
Twist­ed and torn they rose,
The tor­tured bones of a per­ished race
Of mon­sters no mor­tal knows.
They star­tled the mind’s repose.

And a man stood there, as still as moss,
A lichen form that stared;
And an old blind hound, that seemed at loss,
For­ev­er around him fared
With a snarling fang half-bared.

I looked at the man. I saw him plain.
Like a dead weed, gray and wan,
Or a breath of dust. —I looked again—
And man and dog were gone—
Like wisps o’ the gray­ing dawn.…

Were they a part of the grim death there?—
Rag­weed, fen­nel, and rue?—
Or forms of the mind, an old despair,
That there into sem­blance grew
Out of the grief I knew?