No, our kind cannot live with these
Solitudes, desolations, steeps and distances –
Mere emptiness to us the great spaces, where at ease
Mountains repose; they make nothing of us.
Their being is not of our mode or scale.

Some see a man’s face on a crag, but it is not so;
Yet rock has a face that we see sometimes smile
And sometimes close. Five Sisters of Kintail –
But no kindred of ours
Those sisters of wind and gale.

Veering beneath crests of snow
Only wings know 
The wind and know its flow; eagle and crow
in air unbounded come and go.
Like ant on lichened stone the dun stag pastures on the moor below.

But shepherd under hill in hovel of stone
Living companionable with crag and storm
May hear them speak, the alone to the alone,
Beyond the compass of the known.
Pipe music has the sound of distance in its drone.

Or a child may stray
Away on the wild hills as far as eye can see
Whose sight unhindered runs where summit meets the sky.
In the lens of a buzzard’s eye the hills lie.

So lost,
Into how vast a loneliness we are gathered,
Into a strangeness how remote,
Existence without end; presences that yet
Protect us from invading night
And the unbroken silence of the dead.