Tips of my tree in the springtime bursting to terrible beauty, Folded green life, exquisite, holy exultant; I feel in you the splendour, the autumn of ripe fulfilment, Love and labour and death, the sacred pageant of life. In the sweet curled buds of you, In the opening glory of leaves, tissues moulded of green light; Veined, cut, perfect to type, Each one like a child of high lineage bearing the sigil of race.
The open hands of my tree held out to the touch of the air As love that opens its arms and waits on the lover's will; The curtsey, the sway, and the toss of the spray as it sports with the breeze; Rhythmical whisper of leaves that murmur and move in the light; Crying of wind in the boughs, the beautiful music of pain: Thus do you sing and say The sorrow, the effort, the sweet surrender, the joy.
Come! tented leaves of my tree; High summer is here, the moment of passionate life, The hushed, the maternal hour. Deep in the shaded green your mystery shielding, Heir of the ancient woods and parent of forests to be, Lo! to your keeping is given the Father's life-giving thought; The thing that is dream and deed and carries the gift of the past. For this, for this, great tree, The glory of maiden leaves, the solemn stretch of the bough, The wise persistent roots Into the stuff of the world their filaments forcing, Breaking the earth to their need.
Tall tree, your name is peace. You are the channel of God: His mystical sap, Elixir of infinite love, syrup of infinite power, Swelling and shaping, brooding and hiding, With out-thrust of delicate joy, with pitiless pageant of death, Sings in your cells; Its rhythmical cycle of life In you is fulfilled.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.
I am the dancer of the wood I shimmer in the solitude Men call me Birch Tree, yet I know In other days it was not so. I am a Dryad slim and white Who danced too long one summer night, And the Dawn found and prisoned me! Captive I moaned my liberty. But let the wood wind flutes begin Their elfin music, faint and thin, I sway, I bend, retreat, advance, And evermore--I dance! I dance!