Or raked a savage ocean-strand
     With one incessant drowning screech. 
     Here stood a solitary beech,
     That gave its gold with open hand,
     And all its branches, toning chill,
     Did seem to shut their teeth right fast,
     To shriek more mercilessly shrill,
     And match the fierceness of the blast.

     But heard I a low swell that noised
     Of far-off ocean, I was ’ware
     Of pines upon their wide roots poised,
     Whom never madness in the air
     Can draw to more than loftier stress
     Of mournfulness, not mournfulness
     For melancholy, but Joy’s excess,
     That singing on the lap of sorrow faints: 
     And Peace, as in the hearts of saints
     Who chant unto the Lord their God;
     Deep Peace below upon the muffled sod,
     The stillness of the sea’s unswaying floor,
     Could I be sole there not to see
     The life within the life awake;
     The spirit bursting from the tree,
     And rising from the troubled lake? 
     Pour, let the wines of Heaven pour! 
     The Golden Harp is struck once more,
     And all its music is for me! 
     Pour, let the wines of Heaven pour! 
     And, ho, for a night of Pagan glee!

     There is a curtain o’er us. 
     For once, good souls, we’ll not pretend
     To be aught better than her who bore us,
     And is our only visible friend. 
     Hark to her laughter! who laughs like this,
     Can she be dead, or rooted in pain? 
     She has been slain by the narrow brain,
     But for us who love her she lives again. 
     Can she die?  O, take her kiss!

The crimson-footed nymph is panting up the glade, With the wine-jar at her arm-pit, and the drunken ivy-braid Round her forehead, breasts, and thighs:  starts a Satyr, and they speed:  Hear the crushing of the leaves:  hear the cracking of the bough!  And the whistling of the bramble, the piping of the weed!

     But the bull-voiced oak is battling now: 
     The storm has seized him half-asleep,
     And round him the wild woodland throngs
     To hear the fury of his songs,
     The uproar of an outraged deep. 
     He wakes to find a wrestling giant
     Trunk to trunk and limb to limb,
     And on his rooted force reliant
     He laughs and grasps the broadened giant,
     And twist and roll the Anakim;
     And multitudes, acclaiming to the cloud,
     Cry which is breaking, which is bowed.

     Away, for the cymbals clash aloft
     In the circles of pine, on the moss-floor soft. 
     The nymphs of the woodland are gathering there. 
     They huddle the leaves, and trample, and toss;
     They swing in the branches, they roll in the moss,
     They blow the seed on the air. 
     Back to back they stand and blow
     The winged seed on the cradling air,
     A fountain of leaves over bosom and back.