Look How the Bittersweet with Lazy Muscle Moves Aside

Look how the bittersweet with lazy muscle moves aside 
Great stones placed here by planning men not without sweat 
     and pride.
And yet how beautiful this broken wall applied
No more to its first duty: to keep sheep or cattle in;
Bought up by Beauty now, with the whole calm abandoned 
     countryside.

And how the bittersweet to meet the stunned admiring eye with 
     all
The red and orange splendour of its fruit at the first stare 
Unclasps its covering leaves, lets them all fall, 
Strips to the twig, is bare.

See, too, the nightshade, the woody, the bittersweet, strangling 
     the wall
For this, the beauty of berries, this scandalous, bright
Persimmon and tangerine comment on fieldstone, on granite and 
     on quartz, by might

Of men and crowbars, and a rock for lever, and a rock above a
     rock wedged in, and the leverage right,
Wrested from the tough acres that in time must yield 
And suffer plow and harrow and be a man's hay-field— 
Wrested, hoisted, balanced on its edge, tipped, tumbled, clear 
Of its smooth-walled cool hole lying, dark and damp side 
     upward in the sun, inched and urged upon the stone-boat, 
     hauled here.

Yet mark where the rowan, the mountain ash berries, hang 
     bunched amid leaves like ferns,
Scarlet in clear blue air, and the tamarack turns
Yellow as mustard, and sheds its short needles to lie on the 
     ground like light
Through the door of a hut in the forest to travellers miles off 
     the road at night;
Where brilliant the briony glows in the hedge, frail, clustered, elliptical fruit;
Nightshade conserving in capsules transparent of jacinth and 
     amber its jellies of ill-repute.
And only the cherries, that ripened for robins and cherry-birds, 
     burned
With more ruddy a spark than the bark and the leaves of the 
     cherry-tree, red in October turned.