Across the unfenced wide marsh levels, where the dry
  Brown ferns sigh out, and last year’s sedges scold
In some drear language, rustling haggardly
  Their thin dead leaves and dusky hoods of gold;
Across grey beechwoods where the pallid leaves unfalling
In the blind gusts like homeless ghosts are calling
  With voices cracked and old;

Across the solitary clearings, where the low
  Fierce gusts howl through the blinded woods, and round
The buried shanties all day long the snow
  Sifts and piles up in many a spectral mound;
Across lone villages in eery wilderness
Whose hidden life no living shape confesses
  Nor any human sound;

Across the serried masses of dim cities, blown
  Full of the snow that ever shifts and swells,
While far above them all their towers of stone
  Stand and beat back your fierce and tyrannous spells,
And hour by hour send out, like voices torn and broken
Of battling giants that have grandly spoken,
  The veering sound of bells;

So day and night, oh wind, with hiss and moan you fleet,
  Where once long gone on many a green-leafed day
Your gentler brethren wandered with light feet
  And sang with voices soft and sweet as they,
The same blind thought that you with wilder might are speaking,
Seeking the same strange thing that you are seeking
  In this your stormier way.

Oh wind, wild-voiced brother, in your northern cave,
  My spirit also being so beset
With pride and pain, I heard you beat and rave,
  Grinding your chains with furious howl and fret,
Knowing full well that all earth’s moving things inherit
The same chained might and madness of the spirit,
  That none may quite forget.

You in your cave of snows, we in our narrow girth
  Of need and sense, forever chafe and pine;
Only in moods of some demonic birth
  Our souls take fire, our flashing wings untwine;
Even like you, mad wind, above our broken prison,
With streaming hair and maddened eyes uprisen,
  We dream ourselves divine;

Mad moods that come and go in some mysterious way,
  That flash and fall, none knoweth how or why,
Oh wind, our brother, they are yours to-day,
  The stormy joy, the sweeping mastery;
Deep in our narrow cells, we hear you, we awaken,
With hands afret and bosoms strangely shaken,
  We answer to your cry.

I most that love you, wind, when you are fierce and free,
  In these dull fetters cannot long remain;
Lo, I will rise and break my thongs and flee
  Forth to your drift and beating, till my brain
Even for an hour grow wild in your divine embraces,
And then creep back into mine earthly traces,
  And bind me with my chain.

Nay, wind, I hear you, desperate brother, in your might
  Whistle and howl; I shall not tarry long,
And though the day be blind and fierce, the night
  Be dense and wild, I still am glad and strong
To meet you face to face; through all your gust and drifting
With brow held high, my joyous hands uplifting,
  I cry you song for song.