The Sound of Trees I wonder if anyone else could tell
The sound of trees, when the wind passes through
If anyone, of leaves and time,
Would hear what they say;
I could not ask them;
And there’s the well of nested green around,
And I remain in branches of this evening,
But there would be a quiet edge where I stood
By night if they were no longer larger than us;

I wandered through their absence, their framing light
Suggests the fact that they are bigger than courage;
The boughs throw shadows quickly now
And they rise slowly into the night beyond
Where I can’t follow too;

They stand all day beneath their tonnage,
Willing the lasting silence of roots to rise
To some unknown place where they will not also try
To slumber in stillness through this well of sound.

The branches make music of a sort of sleep,
What the trees say, I couldn’t begin to guess,
For no voice in silence
Could tell me there would be
A soft sentence sung
To a light against the thoughts falling.

Although music will call them through the night
Though I will not answer them, again, to mend;
This is a path I think I understand,
I would return to tread carefully into the mystic beneath
How each brings a single sound to
one who waits quiet to hear them within the movements of the stars.

• Robert Frost