Through the Green Forest

Through the green forest softly without a sound, / Wrapped in a still mood / As in a cloak and hood

I went, and cast no shadow in the shadow of the wood.

There grew beeches taller than a ship's mast / That rocks from wave to wave

On the great seas of the world.

I looked into their tops;

Their tops were in another world;

Tossed in a sunny air as far from me / As the foam on waves that follow each other fast, / All day, unseen by man, over the sunny sea.

Naked birches, whiter than a god's thigh, / I saw, and stared, between the stems of the black pines;

Boulders whiter than a dream remembered by day / Stood in the brook's way, / Damp with mosses greener than an emerald's eye.

And ferns where the water sloped from stone to stone in the clear dark / Without ripple or speech

Curved motionless, rooted in rotted bark / And leaves laid together and the rifled husks of the beech.