 | Poems descriptive, dramatic, legendary and contemplative |  |
FLOWERS IN AUTUMN.
I.
Sweet roses! that alone beneath the sky,The mellow sky of autumn, are, of all
Life's and remember'd nature's blandishments,
Purest and sweetest,—ye shall haply fall
Into a yellow sickliness and die!
The gentle heart that knows your luxury,
And deems ye sweetest pilgrims of the wood,
And found ye always gracious in your mood,
Bringing to Fancy its most precious food,
Such fate might well appall,—
But that your purple hues and delicate scents
Have taken fast abode in memory,
She will not lose ye, will not let ye fly!
II.
Upon each broken stalk,Drooping in autumn's tears all desolate,
Sadly, in wild but well-accustom'd walk,
She mourns your hapless fate,
The beauty of your youth, the shortness of your date!
No charm is lost ye had for her when first
Your little petals into blossom burst!
101
The swallow won his wing,
How she hath sought in thought-imprison'd mood,
Your nun-like sweetness in your solitude,—
Glad to commune, unhooded monitors,
With such as wore a sorrow sweet like hers!
III.
And ye repaid her, well repaid, in kind;For where, in what sweet vale
Of Yemen or of Trebizond,—
Or lands yet far beyond,
Decreed to beauty and the joys of earth,
When summer's infant warbler, from a throat
Bursting with joyous song and attic note,
Pours to the blossoming year his garrulous tale—
Could she have stray'd to find
Such beauty as ye 'herited from birth,
Such sweetness as ye lavish'd on the gale
At the warm wooing of the southern wind?
IV.
Life was a joy to ye forever, yetYe shudder not to die;
Your leaves are pale, but with a sweet regret,
That half persuades a faith that every sigh
Of parting hath its pleasure. Ye betray
No anguish, offer up no prayer to stay;
With feeble yearnings striving to oppose
The blight that o'er ye blows.
Sure some true instinct bids ye moralize,
And fits ye to restore to the pure skies
The sweets we know ye by.
So meekly to your doom
Ye bend to meet the summoning of death,
102
Yield beauty, sweet and bloom!
V.
Happy, thrice happy, perishing in sweet,While yet the bloom is on ye and the scent
Is soft about ye, and the birds repeat,
At parting, the same songs of love and joy
That hail'd your budding from the firmament.
Death may destroy
Your being—not your beauty or your bliss—
And solace lives in this;
For thus ye know not that ye fade and fall,
Melting, as 'twere, into the sleep of all,
With a sweet prelude calm that shows like heaven!
No tender strings are riven,
Ye know not pangs—ye feel no venom'd dart
Go griding through the heart!
Ah! happy thus to part!
To go from life—its little hopes, its toys,
The idle of its promise and its noise—
Calmly as into slumbers that desire
No counsel of the awakening and the dawn,—
As bright flames in the hearth at night expire,
Nor say when they are gone!
VI.
Pale flowers, ye teach the lessons that I feel,And, with a pictured gaze, lingering I look
Upon your parted leaves as in a book,
Which doth most pure philosophies reveal.
Your beauty hath not spoil'd ye, to deny
Your sweetness to the fond and hungering sense;
103
And ask no recompense.
Ye serve with meekness as with sweet, and go,
Even as ye came, in silence, nor complain
That they who loved ye, whom ye gladden'd so,
Would have ye still remain.
| Poems descriptive, dramatic, legendary and contemplative | |