dots-menu
×

Home  »  A Library of American Literature  »  The Voice of the Pine

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

The Voice of the Pine

By Charles Timothy Brooks (1813–1883)

[Born in Salem, Mass., 1813. Died at Newport, R. I., 1883. Poems, Original and Translated. 1885.]

O TALL old pine! old gloomy pine!

Old grim, gigantic, gloomy pine!

What is there in that voice of thine

That thrills so deep this heart of mine?

Is it that in thy mournful sigh

Old years and voices long gone by,

And feelings that can never die,

Come thronging back on memory?

Is it that in thy solemn roar

My listening spirit hears once more

The trumpet-music of the host

Of billows round my native coast?

Or is it that I catch a sound

Of that more vast and dread profound,—

The soul’s unfathomable sea,

The ocean of eternity?