So late in Autumn half the world's asleep, And half the wakeful world looks pinched and pale; For dampness now, not freshness, rides the gale; And cold and colorless comes ashore the deep With tides that bluster or with tides that creep; Now veiled uncouthness wears an uncouth veil Of fog, not sultry haze; and blight and bale Have done their worst, and leaves rot on the heap. So late in Autumn one forgets the Spring, Forgets the Summer with its opulence, The callow birds that long have found a wing, The swallows that more lately gat them hence: Will anything like Spring, will anything Like Summer, rouse one day the slumbering sense?
Here now is Winter. Winter, after all, Is not so drear as was my boding dream While Autumn gleamed its latest watery gleam On sapless leafage too inert to fall. Still leaves and berries clothe my garden wall Where ivy thrives on scantiest sunny beam; Still here a bud and there a blossom seem Hopeful, and robin still is musical. Leaves, flowers and fruit and one delightful song Remain; these days are short, but now the nights Intense and long, hang out their utmost lights; Such starry nights are long, yet not too long; Frost nips the weak, while strengthening still the strong Against that day when Spring sets all to rights.
A hundred thousand birds salute the day:-- One solitary bird salutes the night: Its mellow grieving wiles our grief away, And tunes our weary watches to delight; It seems to sing the thoughts we cannot say, To know and sing them, and to set them right; Until we feel once more that May is May, And hope some buds may bloom without a blight. This solitary bird outweighs, outvies, The hundred thousand merry-making birds Whose innocent warblings yet might make us wise Would we but follow when they bid us rise, Would we but set their notes of praise to words And launch our hearts up with them to the skies.
A host of things I take on trust: I take The nightingales on trust, for few and far Between those actual summer moments are When I have heard what melody they make. So chanced it once at Como on the Lake: But all things, then, waxed musical; each star Sang on its course, each breeze sang on its car, All harmonies sang to senses wide-awake. All things in tune, myself not out of tune, Those nightingales were nightingales indeed: Yet truly an owl had satisfied my need, And wrought a rapture underneath that moon, Or simple sparrow chirping from a reed; For June that night glowed like a doubled June.