Owl Roost

The slope is a mass of vines: If you walk in the daylight there, A gleam as of twilight shines Through the vines massed everywhere: Each trunk, that a creeper twines, Is a column, strong to bear The dome of its leaves that wave, Cathedral-dim and grave.

Black moss makes silent the feet: And, above, the fox-grapes lace So thick that the noonday heat Is chill as a murdered face: And the winds for miles repeat The fugue of a rolling bass: The deep leaves twinkle and turn But over no flower or fern.

An angular spider weaves Great webs between the trees, Webs that are witches’ sieves: And honey-and bumblebees Go droning among the leaves, Like the fairies’ oboës: At dark the owlets croon To the stars and the sickle-moon.

At dark I will not go There where the branches sigh; Where naught but the glow-worms glow, Each one like a demon’s eye: O’er which, like a battle-bow, With an arrow that it lets fly, The new-moon and one star Hang and glimmer afar.

At dawn, if my mood be dim, And the day be a cloudless one, There where the sad winds hymn I ’ll walk, but its shade will shun; Its shade, where I feel the grim Horror of something done Here in the years long past, That the place conceals to the last.