  Blood-coloured 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 rings a faint 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 some sad ghost, steals over field and dell. The oaks against a copper sky—o'er which, like some black lake Of Dis, dark 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, Within its wall 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 is here again. |
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