| EVENING was in the wood, louring with storm. | |
| A time of drought had sucked the weedy pool | |
| And baked the channels; birds had done with song. | |
| Thirst was a dream of fountains in the moon, | |
| Or willow-music blown across the water | 5 |
| Leisurely sliding on by weir and mill. | |
| |
| Uneasy was the man who wandered, brooding, | |
| His face a little whiter than the dusk. | |
| A drone of sultry wings flicker’d in his head. | |
| The end of sunset burning thro’ the boughs | 10 |
| Died in a smear of red; exhausted hours | |
| Cumber’d, and ugly sorrows hemmed him in. | |
| |
| He thought: ‘Somewhere there’s thunder,’ as he strove | |
| To shake off dread; he dared not look behind him, | |
| But stood, the sweat of horror on his face. | 15 |
| |
| He blunder’d down a path, trampling on thistles, | |
| In sudden race to leave the ghostly trees. | |
| And: ‘Soon I’ll be in open fields,’ he thought, | |
| And half remembered starlight on the meadows, | |
| Scent of mown grass and voices of tired men, | 20 |
| Fading along the field-paths; home and sleep | |
| And cool-swept upland spaces, whispering leaves, | |
| And far off the long churring night-jar’s note. | |
| |
| But something in the wood, trying to daunt him, | |
| Led him confused in circles through the thicket. | 25 |
| He was forgetting his old wretched folly, | |
| And freedom was his need; his throat was choking. | |
| Barbed brambles gripped and clawed him round his legs, | |
| And he floundered over snags and hidden stumps. | |
| Mumbling: ‘I will get out! I must get out!’ | 30 |
| Butting and thrusting up the baffling gloom, | |
| Pausing to listen in a space ’twixt thorns, | |
| He peers around with peering, frantic eyes. | |
| |
| An evil creature in the twilight looping, | |
| Flapped blindly in his face. Beating it off, | 35 |
| He screeched in terror, and straightway something clambered | |
| Heavily from an oak, and dropped, bent double, | |
| To shamble at him zigzag, squat and bestial. | |
| |
| Headlong he charges down the wood, and falls | |
| With roaring brain—agony—the snap’t spark— | 40 |
| And blots of green and purple in his eyes. | |
| Then the slow fingers groping on his neck, | |
| And at his heart the strangling clasp of death. | |
