H ERE'S a bent tree:
Hated and loved it, have I, years in turn;
Cool fan-flake roof and dappled root in fern,
What do they say for me?
This only: here
This only: here
I stood alone, once, in a vanished year,
Imagining
A most vain thing.

Mark Folly well:
But her divine disguising
Who may tell?
What golden spider in the mind, devising
How he should fling his unseen filmy rope,
Chanced here to shed
On trembling beech-twig tender overhead
His skein of airy hope?
On that day I
Lay leafy-lost, sun-sped,
Till greenlight fled
And the sky whispered, and a web was spun
Never to be undone.
Bent tree,
O hatred part of me,
By what an iron cord you bind me now
Fast to your bitter bough!