Poe Fridays: The Forest Reverie

This week's Poe Fridays poem is The Forest Reverie which you can read here but I've also copied it here:

'Tis said that when
The hands of men
Tamed this primeval wood,
And hoary trees with groans of wo,
Like warriors by an unknown foe,
Were in their strength subdued,
The virgin Earth
Gave instant birth
To springs that ne'er did flow--
That in the sun
Did rivulets run,
And all around rare flowers did blow--
The wild rose pale
Perfumed the gale,
And the queenly lily adown the dale
(Whom the sun and the dew
And the winds did woo),
With the gourd and the grape luxuriant grew.
So when in tears
The love of years
Is wasted like the snow,
And the fine fibrils of its life
By the rude wrong of instant strife
Are broken at a blow--
Within the heart
Do springs upstart
Of which it doth now know,
And strange, sweet dreams,
Like silent streams
That from new fountains overflow,
With the earlier tide
Of rivers glide
Deep in the heart whose hope has died--
Quenching the fires its ashes hide,--
Its ashes, whence will spring and grow
Sweet flowers, ere long,--
The rare and radiant flowers of song!

This poem strangely is not in my "Complete" Tales & Poems book. Perhaps it is because it is so odd for Poe to have written a nature poem. This one must have been written in a hopeful time for Poe. He describes the ebb and flow of nature, the tearing down and building up that happen cyclically. I suppose he had some reason at this point to think that things were looking up. Ironically, this poem makes me feel sad for Poe because his life eventually ends on a low note.

For next week's Poe Fridays, I'm choosing the short story The Assignation.

Enjoying the "strange, sweet dreams" of Poe,
K