The Happy Tree / Gerald Gould

The Happy Tree

There was a bright and happy tree;
     The wind with music laced its boughs;
Thither across the homeless seas
     Came singing birds to house.

Men grudged the tree its happy eves,
     Its happy dawns of eager sound;
So that all crown and tower of leaves
     They leveled with the ground.

They made an upright of the stem,
     A cross-piece of a bough they made;
No shadow of their deed on them
     Their fallen branches laid.

But blithely, since the year was young,
     When they a fitting hill did find,
There on the happy tree they hung
     The Saviour of mankind.

~~
Gerald Gould (1885-1936)
from The Happy Tree, and other poems, 1919

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

Gerald Gould biography