Michael Angelo by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

MICHAEL ANGELO, alone in the woods.

MICHAEL ANGELO. / How still it is among these ancient oaks! / Surges and undulations of the air / Uplift the leafy boughs, and let them fall / With scarce a sound. Such sylvan quietudes / Become old age. These huge centennial oaks, / That may have heard in infancy the trumpets / Of Barbarossa's cavalry, deride / Man's brief existence, that with all his strength / He cannot stretch beyond the hundredth year. / This little acorn, turbaned like the Turk, / Which with my foot I spurn, may be an oak / Hereafter, feeding with its bitter mast / The fierce wild boar, and tossing in its arms / The cradled nests of birds, when all the men / That now inhabit this vast universe, / They and their children, and their children's children, / Shall be but dust and mould, and nothing more. / Through openings in the trees I see below me / The valley of Clitumnus, with its farms / And snow-white oxen grazing in the shade / Of the tall poplars on the river's brink. / O Nature, gentle mother, tender nurse! / I who have never loved thee as I ought, / But wasted all my years immured in cities, / And breathed the stifling atmosphere of streets, / Now come to thee for refuge. Here is peace. / Yonder I see the little hermitages / Dotting the mountain side with points of light, / And here St. Julian's convent, like a nest / Of curlews, clinging to some windy cliff. / Beyond the broad, illimitable plain / Down sinks the sun, red as Apollo's quoit, / That, by the envious Zephyr blown aside, / Struck Hyacinthus dead, and stained the earth / With his young blood, that blossomed into flowers. / And now, instead of these fair deities / Dread demons haunt the earth; hermits inhabit / The leafy homes of sylvan Hamadryads; / And jovial friars, rotund and rubicund, / Replace the old Silenus with his ass.