Briar and fennel and chincapin,

    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 the grasshopper,

    Clung to the loneliness

    Like burrs to a trailing 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 lonely, 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 started the mind’s repose.

And a man stood there, as still as moss,

    A lichen form that stared;

With an old blind hound that, at a 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 of 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?