SONG OF POPLARS

by: Aldous Huxley

      HEPHERD, to yon tall poplars tune your flute:
      Let them pierce keenly, subtly shrill,
      The slow blue rumour of the hill;
      Let the grass cry with an anguish of evening gold,
      And the great sky be mute.
       
      Then hearken how the poplar trees unfold
      Their buds, yet close and gummed and blind,
      In airy leafage of the mind,
      Rustling in silvery whispers the twin-hued scales
      That fade not nor grow old.
       
      "Poplars and fountains and you cypress spires
      Springing in dark and rusty flame,
      Seek you aught that hath a name?
      Or say, say: Are you all an upward agony
      Of undefined desires?
       
      "Say, are you happy in the golden march
      Of sunlight all across the day?
      Or do you watch the uncertain way
      That leads the withering moon on cloudy stairs
      Over the heaven's wide arch?
       
      "Is it towards sorrow or towards joy you lift
      The sharpness of your trembling spears?
      Or do you seek, through the grey tears
      That blur the sky, in the heart of the triumphing blue,
      A deeper, calmer rift?"
       
      So; I have tuned my music to the trees,
      And there were voices, dim below
      Their shrillness, voices swelling slow
      In the blue murmur of hills, and a golden cry
      And then vast silences.

'Song of Poplars' is reprinted from An Anthology of Modern Verse. Ed. A. Methuen. London: Methuen & Co., 1921.

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