Unaltered aisles that wait and wait forever,
O woods that gleam and stir in liquid gold,
What of your little lover who departed
Before the year grew old?

The leaves are very perfect in the forest,
This is the perfect hour of summer's wane,
And but last year we watched the blue October,
Between the parted boughs, as now, Lorane.

We asked of Life the old, eternal questions;
We asked of God: ‘Art Thou not here; and why?
Why never come with heralds of the morning
Across this blaze of sky?

‘Why build Thyself these great and perfect places;
Why build, and never come to walk therein?’
And only rippling sunshine was the answer,
Or little pattering footsteps of the rain.

But still we sought Him, in the blue-white winter,
Or in the rosy spring or shadowy fall;
And faithful winds went forth with us to meet him,
And all the heaven was one vibrating call.

We sought Him, and our own love seemed the answer;
We called Him, and the forest smiled us back.
Then we forgot, and only looked for laughter
Along the wild-wood track.

Yet sometimes, when the moon sang down her cadence
Through all the forest roof so old and high,
We trembled from the sense of all we knew not—
The awful incompleteness of the sky.

And all the years we two went forth together
We never heard that third step on the sod.
I was alone—alone before I felt it,
And turned, and looked on God.

And God said: ‘I am loneliness and sorrow,
And I am questioning hope, and I am strife;
I am the joy that surges through my forest,
And I am death in life.

‘I am the singing bird, the leaf, the shadow,
I am the circle of the endless earth;
Out of the infinite of all creation
I am the silence where the soul finds birth.’

And so, unaltered aisles that wait forever
And woods that gleam and stir in liquid gold,
You have made answer for the little lover
Who passed ere you grew old.