Golden-rod.
Lucy Larcom.
Midsummer music in the grass—
The cricket and the grasshopper;
White daisies and red clover pass;
The caterpillar trails her fur
After the languid butterfly;
But green and spring-like is the sod
Where autumn’s earliest lamps I spy—
The tapers of the golden-rod.
This flower is fuller of the sun
Than any our pale North can show;
It has the heart of August won,
And scatters wide the warmth and glow
Kindled at summer’s mid-noon blaze,
Where gentians of September bloom
Along October’s leaf-strewn ways,
And through November’s paths of gloom.
As lavish of its golden light
As sunshine’s self, this blossom is;
Its starry chandeliers burn bright
All day; and have you noted this—
A perfect sun in every flower,—
Ten thousand thousand fairy suns,
Raying from new disks hour by hour,
As up the stalk the life-flash runs?
Because its myriad glimmering plumes
Like a great army’s stir and wave,
Because its gold in billows blooms,
The poor man’s barren walks to lave;
Because its sun-shaped blossoms show
How souls receive the light of God,
And unto earth give back that glow—
I thank Him for the golden-rod.