  What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, The bowl between me and those distant-hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair! No more the landscape holds its wealth apart, Making me poorer in my poverty, 10But mingles with my senses and my heart; My own projected spirit seems to me In her own reverie the world to steep; 'T is she that waves to sympathetic sleep, Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill and tree. 15How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees, Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms, Each into each, the hazy distances! The softened season all the landscape charms; Those hills, my native village that embay, And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms. Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves; The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory 25Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye Of Boaz as the maiden's glow went by, So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives. The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn, 30Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates, Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne, Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits; Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails; Silently overhead the hen-hawk sails, The sobered robin, hunger-silent now, Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer; The chipmunk, on the shingly shagbark's bough, Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear, 40Then drops his nut, and, cheeping, with a bound Whisks to his winding fastness underground; The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere. O'er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call 45Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; The single crow a single caw lets fall; And all around me every bush and tree Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all. 50The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves; The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, 55Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves. He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt, Who, 'mid some council of the sad-garbed whites, Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt, 60With distant eye broods over other sights, Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace, The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace, The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost, 65And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry, After the first betrayal of the frost, Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky: The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold, To the faint Summer, beggared now and old, 70Pour back the sunshine hoarded 'neath her favoring eye. The ash her purple drops forgivingly And sadly, breaking not the general hush: The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea, Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush; 75All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days, Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush. O'er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine 80Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and re-crossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine. 85Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary, Whose loose blocks topple 'neath the plough-boy's foot, Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye, Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot, The woodbine up the elm's straight stem aspires, In the ivy's paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute. Below, the Charles, a stripe of nether sky, Now hid by rounded apple-trees between, Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by, 95Now flickering golden through a woodland screen, Then spreading out, at his next turn beyond, A silver circle like an inland pond— Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green. Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight 100Who cannot in their various incomes share, From every season drawn, of shade and light |
|
