Fall gentler sleep upon you now, while soft
Airs circle swallow-like from hedge to croft
Below your lowest naked-rooted troop. 
Let evening slowly droop
Into the middle of your boughs and stoop
Quiet breathing down to your scarce-quivering side
And rest there satisfied.

Yet sleep herself may wake
And through your heavy unlit dome, O Mount of beeches, shake. 
Then shall your massy columns yield
Again the company all day concealed.... 
Is it their shapes that sweep
Serene within the ambit of the Moon
Sentinel’d by shades slow-marching with moss-footed hours that creep
From dusk of night to dusk of day—­slow-marching, yet too soon
Approaching morn?  Are these their grave
Remembering ghosts?
...  Already your full-foliaged branches wave,
And the thin failing hosts
Into your secrecies are swift withdrawn
Before the certain footsteps of the dawn.

But you, O beeches, even as men have root Deep in apparent and substantial things.  Birds on your branches leap and shake their wings, Long ere night falls the soft owl loosens her slow hoot From the unfathomed fountains of your gloom.  Late western sunbeams on your broad trunks bloom, Levelled from the low opposing hill, and fold Your inmost conclave with a burning gold. ...  Than those night-ghosts awhile more solid, men Pass within your sharp shade that makes an arctic night Of common light, And pause, swift measuring tree by tree; and then Paint their vivid mark, Ciphering fatality on each unwrinkled bark Across the sunken stain That every season’s gathered streaming rain Has deepened to a darker grain.  You of this fatal sign unconscious lift Your branches still, each tree her lofty tent;
Still light and twilight drift
Between, and lie in wan pools silver sprent. 
But comes a day, a step, a voice, and now
The repeated stroke, the noosed and tethered bough,
The sundered trunk upon the enormous wain
Bound kinglike with chain over chain,
New wounded and exposed with each old stain. 
And here small pools of doubtful light are lakes
Shadowless and no more that rude bough-music wakes.

So on men too the indifferent woodman, Time,
Servant of unseen Master, nearing sets
His unread symbol—­or who reads forgets;
And suns and seasons fall and climb,
Leaves fall, snows fall, Spring flutters after Spring,
A generation a generation begets. 
But comes a day—­though dearly the tough roots cling
To common earth, branches with branches sing—­
And that obscure sign’s read, or swift misread,
By the indifferent woodman or his slave
Disease, night-wandered from a fever-dripping cave. 
No chain’s then needed for no fearful king,
But light earth-fall on foot and hand and head.