We dance round in a ring and suppose,But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

I didn’t make you know how glad I wasTo have you come and camp here on our land.I promised myself to get down some dayAnd see the way you lived, but I don’t know!With a houseful of hungry men to feedI guess you’d find…. It seems to meI can’t express my feelings any moreThan I

The way a crowShook down on meThe dust of snowFrom a hemlock tree Has given my heartA change of moodAnd saved some partOf a day I had rued.

Tree at my window, window tree,My sash is lowered when night comes on;But let there never be curtain drawnBetween you and me. Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,And thing next most diffuse to cloud,Not all your light tongues talking aloudCould be profound. But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,And if you

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,On a white heal-all, holding up a mothLike a white piece of rigid satin cloth —Assorted characters of death and blightMixed ready to begin the morning right,Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth —A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

As I came to the edge of the woods,Thrush music — hark!Now if it was dusk outside,Inside it was dark. Too dark in the woods for a birdBy sleight of wingTo better its perch for the night,Though it still could sing. The last of the light of the sunThat had died in the westStill lived

But outer Space,At least this far,For all the fussOf the populaceStays more popularThan populous

Spades take up leavesNo better than spoons,And bags full of leavesAre light as balloons. I make a great noiseOf rustling all dayLike rabbit and deerRunning away. But the mountains I raiseElude my embrace,Flowing over my armsAnd into my face. I may load and unloadAgain and againTill I fill the whole shed,And what have I then?

I dwell in a lonely house I knowThat vanished many a summer ago,And left no trace but the cellar walls,And a cellar in which the daylight falls,And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow. O’er ruined fences the grape-vines shieldThe woods come back to the mowing field;The orchard tree has grown one copseOf new wood and old

From where I lingered in a lull in Marchoutside the sugar-house one night for choice,I called the fireman with a careful voiceAnd bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch:‘O fireman, give the fire another stoke,And send more sparks up chimney with the smoke.’I thought a few might tangle, as they did,Among bare maple