Laurella and other poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Summer declines and roses have grown rare,
But cottage crofts are gay with hollyhocks;
And in old garden-walks you breathe an air
Fragrant of pinks and August-smelling stocks.
The soul of the delicious mignonette
Floats on the wind, and tempts the vagrant bees
From the pale purple spikes of lavender;
Waking a fond regret
For dead July, whose children the sweet-peas
Are sipped by butterflies with wings astir.

Evenings are chill, though in the glowing noon
Swelled peaches bask along a sunny wall,
And mellowing apricots turn gold—too soon
For him who loves not to be near the fall
Of the yet deathless leaves. Pale jessamine
Speaks, with her lucid stars, of shortening days
To spreading fuchsias clad in crimson bells,
Lurking beneath the twine
Of odorous clematis, whose bowery maze
Of gadding flowers the same sad story tells.

119

Now from the sky fall sudden gleams of light
Athwart the plain. Black poplars in the breeze
Whiten—the willows flashing silvery white
At every gust against dark rain-clouds: these
Glooming beneath their crowns of massy snow,
And soaring onward with the wind that rocks
The sprouted elms, and shadowing as they pass
Broad corn-fields ripening slow
In upland farms, where still the uncarted cocks
Stand brown amid the verdurous aftergrass.

Now scream the curlews on the wild west coast,
And sea-birds sport in the sunned ocean—blue
As the intense of heaven. The crested host
Of mighty billows endlessly pursue
Each other in their glorious lion-play;
Surging against the cliffs with thunderous roar,
Till the black rocks seethe in thick-creaming foam,
And bursts of rainbowed spray
Fly o'er the craggy barriers far inshore,
Drenching the thrift in its storm-buffeted home.

Now is the season when soft melancholy
Broods o'er the fields at solemn evenfall;

120

The golden-clouded sunset dying slowly
From the clear west, ere yet the starry pall
Of night is silvered by the harvest moon:
When the year's blood runs rich as luscious wine
With honied ripeness: when the robin's song
Fills the grey afternoon
With warbled hope: and memories divine
Crowd to the heart, of days forgotten long.