Living now in myself the end of the world I watch a tree with dry and shrivelled leaves That curl slowly like fronds of fern-paper. This is the tree that grew from sleep to Eden, Bore blossom and babe, and a million million summers Its leaves have whispered passion's language to lovers And every spring has hung The incarnate god bleeding among its branches Whose dying is perennial as the vine. Now all deaths have been died, Nature has no more wombs for generation, Roof-tree and lintel of the world are broken, And the tree stands, a portent, at my door. Now when the ash is shaking down its last fruits I call to mind the spring, the lost innocence Of flowers, and lovers, beautiful agents of creation. This tree they raised, whose tinder now is dry, Waiting for the ungenerated seed of fire To burst into the last flowering of the world. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...MA LADY'S LIPS AM LIKE DE HONEY (NEGRO LOVE SONG) by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON THE ART OF POETRY; TO CHARLES MORICE by PAUL VERLAINE MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS by ROBERT BURNS EMERSON by MARY ELIZABETH MAPES DODGE THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS by OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES A PSALM OF LIFE by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW |