Classic Poem

(A Ballad of the Blue Ridge )

As I went up the Blue Ridge
I came by Barton Stone,
And the night was a night of leaves and light
Through leafless spaces blown.

I passed into the deep forest,
And the dark night closed me round;
The dark spray flung its mist in my eyes,
The boughs crashed, and I found

A level space of dew and grass
Under a quiet moon,
And in the broken shade a dwarf
Plucking a quiet tune.

Straight from his crooked back uprose
The chestnut's shaggy bark,
And over his wizened pallor fell
Stray fragments of the dark.

And where no leaves withheld the moon
A lovely lady was,
Pacing a dance whose edges swept
The edges of the grass.

With flowers her loosened hair was bound,
And broken laurel buds;
Her sleeves were green as the leaves are green
That stir in the inner woods.

" And who are you, sweet lady,
That dance alone by night,
With shivering veils of silken green
And hair like a shadowy light?

" Your sisters died in England —
Three hundred years are gone —
And never a ship could cleave the seas
'Twixt darkening east and dawn.

" Oh! who are you, sweet lady,
Green-clad, with lightsome foot,
Who touch nor crush the white mushroom
That grows at the chestnut root? "

But still she danced, and still she danced,
And not a sound was there,
But the pressed grass and the plucked lute
Making a plaintive air.

And still she danced, and her courtseys were
As boughs that feel the rain;
Danced, and the fluttering silks were leaves
When the light has come again,

Swept low with waving arms — and left
The leaves and the moon-swept green
And a gnarled and twisted chestnut root
Where the crooked dwarf had been.