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 woodSatiate the hungry dark with melody;--And as a vale is watered by a flood,

Or as the moonlight fills the open skyStruggling with darkness--as a tuberosePeoples some Indian dell with scents which lie

Like clouds above the flower from which they rose,The singing of that happy nightingaleIn 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 abyssOf heaven with all its planets; the dull earOf the night-cradled earth; the loneliness

Of the circumfluous waters,--every sphereAnd 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 belowAspiring 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 heightThe heaven where it would perish!--and every formThat worshipped in the temple of the night

Was awed into delight, and by the charmGirt as with an interminable zone,Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm

Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivionOut of their dreams; harmony became loveIn every soul but one.

And so this man returned with axe and sawAt evening close from killing the tall treen,The soul of whom by Nature's gentle law

Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever greenThe pavement and the roof of the wild copse,Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene

With jagged leaves,--and from the forest topsSinging the winds to sleep--or weeping oftFast showers of aereal 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 lovelinessOf fan-like leaves, and over pallid flowersHang 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 traceriesIn which there is religion--and the mutePersuasion of unkindled melodies,

Odours and gleams and murmurs, which the luteOf the blind pilot-spirit of the blastStirs as it sails, now grave and now acute,

Wakening the leaves and waves, ere it has passedTo such brief unison as on the brainOne tone, which never can recur, has cast,One accent never to return again.

The world is full of Woodmen who expelLove's gentle Dryads from the haunts of life,And vex the nightingales in every dell.