Explore "The Leaf and the Tree" by Edna St. Vincent Millay on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When will you learn, my self, to be / A dying leaf on a living tree?
Budding, swelling, growing strong, / Wearing green, but not for long, / Drawing sustenance from air, / That other leaves, and you not there, / May bud, and at the autumn's call / Wearing russet, ready to fall?
Has not this trunk a deed to do / Unguessed by small and tremulous you?
Shall not these branches in the end / To wisdom and the truth ascend?
And the great lightning plunging by / Look sidewise with a golden eye
To glimpse a tree so tall and proud / It sheds its leaves upon a cloud?
Here, I think, is the heart's grief: / The tree, no mightier than the leaf, / Makes firm its root and spreads its crown / And stands; but in the end comes down.
That airy top no boy could climb / Is trodden in a little time
By cattle on their way to drink.
The fluttering thoughts a leaf can think, / That hears the wind and waits its turn, / Have taught it all a tree can learn.
Time can make soft that iron wood.
The tallest trunk that ever stood, / In time, without a dream to keep, / Crawls in beside the root to sleep.