Classic and Contemporary Poetry
FAREWELL AND HAIL, by JOHN FREEMAN Poet's Biography First Line: Wave you farewell! O woods Last Line: Never farewell. Subject(s): Farewell; Parting | ||||||||
WAVE you Farewell! O woods, That slope down with the hill to this drear pool. Farewell, bronze legionaries, You beechen giants bucklered with green boughs Against those shafts the skies Fling at your heart, and rays from sunny eyes Searching your ridgèd flexures dusky-cool. Wave you Farewell! as the foiled faint wind soughs Withdrawn or slow withdrawing through your boughs. And you, Farewell! mild mother-elms who sway Less with the winds than weight of destined cares. The trumpets of the masculine North wind, The cymbals of the West at stormy play, The fifes shrilled from the East, The honeyed mouth Breathing new sweetness from the South Their rising musics, waning airs, Trouble your bosom of all troubles least. It is man's strife, man's love, man's grief, man's hate, At odds with unstarred Fate, That in your heaving swells, upmounts, subsides And then anon returns like ocean's tides, Until Farewell! is lamped By the Moon passing where passed Moons are camped. You too Farewell! O ships that sail the sphere And sleep unheeded by mossed forest rides, Oak-trees, oak-ships where Time himself has sailed The waveseach wave a long slow soothless year, A century a day, Farewell! A low lance slides Beneath your ribs, the sun's last spear has failed. And crook-back ash, Farewell! Your fingers clutch in vain the sunless cloud, They claw the blue in vain, Lean hungry ash, storm-rocking but unbowed, Unloved, and shaped in pain, Unlovely, save to those that love you well, That love, as lovers must, too well Loved ash, Farewell! Trees, honoured Gods and Goddesses of earth, I am your birth, You are of me, of me: So into the sea Far rivers fall, then briny tides confuse Cold spring and ocean, salt flood with rains and dews. Into what limbs of you my blood has poured, Into my senses dreams of yours have passed, Too loved to be adored, And yet, Divine ones, for brief love too vast. I turn from you, O trees, Farewell! Farewell! But thou, dark Yew, Ancient and undecayed, though ruddy creepers Drape the sick hedge with fire or fiery dew, Dark Yew, With bosom drooping over mounded sleepers, And scarlet cressets lighting solemn plumes And dense funereal glooms, Dark Yew, Root-fast in the eternity of spirit And all man's soul may of earth's dark inherit, Dark Yew, Hail! not farewell, Hail! not farewell, Never farewell. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE THREE CHILDREN by JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN STUDY #2 FOR B.B.L. by JUNE JORDAN WATCHING THE NEEDLEBOATS AT SAN SABBA by JAMES JOYCE |
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