Macrinus Against Trees

How bare! How all the lion-desert lies
Before your cell!
Behind are leaves and boughs on which your eyes
Could, as the eyes of shepherd, on his flock.
That turn to the soft mass from barren rock,
Familiarly dwell.

O Traveller, for me the empty sands
Burning to white!
There nothing on the wilderness withstands
The soul or prayer. I would not look on trees;
My thoughts and will were shaken in their breeze.
And buried as by night.

Yea, listen! If you build a cell, at last.
Turned to the wood.
Your fall is near, your safety overpast;
And if you plant a tree beside your door
Your fall is there beside it, and no more
The solitude is frank and good.

For trees must have soft dampness for their growth.
And interfold
Their boughs and leaves into a screen, not loath
To hide soft, tempting creatures at their play.
That, playing timbrels and bright shawms, delay.
And wear one's spirit old.

Smoothly such numberless distractions come —
Impertinence
Of multiplicity, salute and hum.
Away with solitude of leafy shade.
Mustering coy birds and beasts, and men waylaid,
Tinkling each hooded sense!

Did not God call out of a covert-wood
Adam and Eve,
Where, cowering under earliest sin, they stood,
The hugged green-leaves in bunches round their den?
Himself God called them out — so lost are men
Whom forest haunts receive!'