Briar And Fennel And Chinquapin, And Rue And Ragweed Everywhere; The Field Seemed Sick As A Soul With Sin, Or Dead Of An Old Despair, Born Of An Ancient Care. The Cricket'S Cry And The Locust'S Whirr, And The Note Of A Bird'S Distress, With The Rasping Sound Of A Grasshopp'R, Clung To The Loneliness Like Burrs To A Ragged Dress. So Sad The Field, So Waste The Ground, So Curst With An Old Despair, A Woodchuck'S Burrow, A Blind Mole'S Mound, And A Chipmunk'S Stony Lair, Seemed More Than It Could Bear. So Solemn Too, So More Than Sad, So Droning-Lone With Bees I Wondered What More Could Nature Add To The Sum Of Its Miseries And Then I Saw The Trees. Skeletons Gaunt, That Gnarled The Place, Twisted And Torn They Rose, The Tortured Bones Of A Perished Race Of Monsters No Mortal Knows. They Startled The Mind'S Repose. And A Man Stood There, As Still As Moss, A Lichen Form That Stared; And An Old Blind Hound, That Seemed At Loss, Forever Around Him Fared With A Snarling Fang Half-Bared. I Looked At The Man. I Saw Him Plain. Like A Dead Weed, Gray And Wan, Or A Breath Of Dust. I Looked Again And Man And Dog Were Gone Like Wisps O' The Graying Dawn. . . . Were They A Part Of The Grim Death'There? Ragweed, Fennel, And Rue? Or Forms Of The Mind, An Old Despair, That There Into Semblance Grew Out Of The Grief I Knew?