Was it a voice lamenting for the flowers? Or heart-sick bird that sang of happier hours? A cricket dirging days that soon must die? Or did the ghost of Summer wander by?
Blood-colored oaks, that stand against a sky of gold and brass; Gaunt slopes, on which the bleak leaves glow of brier and sassafras, And broom-sedge strips of smoky pink and pearl-gray clumps of grass In which, beneath the ragged sky, the rain pools gleam like glass.
From west to east, from wood to wood, along the forest-side, The winds,--the sowers of the Lord,--with thunderous footsteps stride; Their stormy hands rain acorns down; and mad leaves, wildly dyed, Like tatters of their rushing cloaks, stream round them far and wide.
The frail leaf-cricket in the weeds sounds its far fairy-bell; And like a torch of phantom ray the milkweed’s windy shell Glimmers; while, wrapped in withered dreams, the wet, autumnal smell Of loam and leaf, like Fall’s own ghost, steals over field and dell.
The oaks, against a copper sky--o’er which, like some black lake Of Dis, bronze clouds, (like surges fringed with sullen fire) break-- Loom sombre as Doom’s citadel above the vales that make A pathway to a land of mist the moon’s pale feet shall take.
Now, dyed with burning carbuncle, a limbo-litten pane, Red in wild walls of storm, the west opens to hill and plain, On which the wild-geese ink themselves, a far triangled train; And then the shuttering clouds close down--and night it comes again.
When I behold how some pursue Fame that is Care’s embodiment, Or fortune, whose false face looks true,-- An humble home with sweet content Is all I ask for me and you.
An humble home, where pigeons coo, Whose path leads under breezy lines Of frosty-berried cedars to A gate, one mass of trumpet-vines, Is all I ask for me and you.
A garden, which, all summer through, The roses old make redolent, And morning-glories, gay of hue, And tansy with its homely scent, Is all I ask for me and you.
An orchard, that the pippins strew, From whose bruised gold the juices spring; A vineyard, where the grapes hang blue, Wine-big and ripe for vintaging, Is all I ask for me and you.
A lane, that leads to some far view Of forest or of fallow-land, Bloomed o’er of rose and meadow-rue, Each with a bee in its hot hand, Is all I ask for me and you.