Explore "The Hedge of Hemlocks" by Edna St. Vincent Millay on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Somebody long ago / Set out this hedge of hemlocks; brought from the woods, I'd say, / Saplings ten inches tall, curving and delicate, not shaped like trees, / And set them out, to shut the marshes from the lawn, / A hedge of ferns.
Four feet apart he set them, far apart, leaving them room to grow . . .
Whose crowded lower boughs these fifty years at least / Are spiky stumps outthrust in all directions, dry, dropping scaly bark, in the deep shade making a thick
Dust which here and there floats in a short dazzling beam.
Green tops, delicate and curving yet, above this fence of brush, like ferns, / You have done well: more than the marshes now is shut away / from his protected dooryard;
The mountain, too, is shut away; not even the wind / May trespass here to stir the purple phlox in the tall grass.
And yet how easily one afternoon between / Your stems, unheard, snapping no twig, dislodging no shell of loosened bark, unseen
Even by the spider through whose finished web he walked, and left it as he found it, / A neighbour entered.