The Charcoal-Burner's Hut

Deep in a valley, green with ancient beech, And wandered through of one small, silent stream, Whose bear-grassed banks bristled with brush and burr, Tick-trefoil and the thorny marigold, Bush-clover and the wahoo, hung with pods, And mass on mass of bugled jewelweed, Horsemint and doddered ragweed, dense, unkempt, I came upon a charcoal-burner's hut, Abandoned and forgotten long ago; His hut and weedy pit, where once the wood Smouldered both day and night like some wild forge, A wildwood forge, glaring as wild-cat eyes. A mossy roof, black, fallen in decay, And rotting logs, exuding sickly mold And livid fungi, and the tottering wreck, Rude remnants, of a chimney, clay and sticks, Were all that now remained to say that once, In time not so remote, one labored here, Labored and lived, his world bound by these woods: A solitary soul whose life was toil, Toil, grimy and unlovely: sad, recluse, A life, perhaps, that here went out alone, Alone and unlamented. Lost forever, Haply, somewhere, in some far wilder spot, Far in the forest, lone as was his life, A grave, an isolated grave, may mark, Tangled with cat-brier and the strawberry-bush, The place he lies in; undistinguishable From the surrounding forest where the lynx Whines in the moonlight and the she-fox whelps. A life as some wood-fungus now forgotten: The Indian-pipe, or ghost-flower, here that rises And slowly rots away in autumn rains. Or, it may be, a comrade carved a line Of date and death on some old trunk of tree, Whose letters long ago th' erasing rust Of moss and gradual growth of drowsy years Slowly obliterated: or, may be, The rock, all rudely lettered, like his life, Set up above him by some kindly hand, A tree's great, grasping roots have overthrown, Where lichens long ago effaced his name.