In A Northern Wood

FRAGRANT are the cedar-boughs stretching green and level,

Feasting-halls where waxwings flit at their spicy revel,

But O the pine, the questing pine, that flings its arms on high

To search the secret of the sun and escalade the sky!

Rueful hemlocks, gaunt and old, with boughs a-droop, despairing,

Clutch for touch of mother-earth; the while the pine is daring

To rock the stars amid its cones and lull them with its croon,

And snare the silver eagle that is nested in the moon.