When day declining sheds a milder gleam, What time the may-fly haunts the pool or stream; When the still owl skims round the grassy mead, What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed; Then be the time to steal adown the vale, And listen to the vagrant cuckoo’s tale;
They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods Before they planted the trees. It is underneath the coppice and heath, And the thin anemones.
From cocoon forth a butterfly As lady from her door Emerged — a summer afternoon — Repairing everywhere, Without design, that I could trace, Except to stray abroad On miscellaneous enterprise The clovers understood.
Mine are the night and morning, The pits of air, the gulf of space, The sportive sun, the gibbous moon, The innumerable days.