“FROST TO-NIGHT”
Apple-green west and an orange bar;
And the crystal eye of a lone, one star ...
And, “Child, take the shears and cut what you will,
Frost to-night—so clear and dead-still.”
Then I sally forth, half sad, half proud,
And I come to the velvet, imperial crowd,
The wine-red, the gold, the crimson, the pied,—
The dahlias that reign by the garden-side.
The dahlias I might not touch till to-night!
A gleam of shears in the fading light,
And I gathered them all,—the splendid throng,
And in one great sheaf I bore them along.
· · · · · ·
In my garden of Life with its all late flowers
I heed a Voice in the shrinking hours:
“Frost to-night—so clear and dead-still” ...
Half sad, half proud, my arms I fill.
George Edward Woodberry
George Edward Woodberry was born in Beverly, Mass., May 12, 1855, and studied at Harvard; his early efforts receiving the approval of James Russell Lowell. From 1891 to 1904 he was Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he exercised a keen influence on many of the younger writers.
His work is decidedly romantic and classical in style, leaning heavily toward the Tennysonian tradition. Although there is an undercurrent of spiritual beauty throughout his poetry, he frequently loses his power of exaltation in a rhetoric that is both stilted and sentimental. His chief collections of verse are The Flight and Other Poems (1900), Wild Eden (1914) and The Roamer and Other Poems (1920). He has also written several books of essays, criticism and biography.