ODE
TO WILLIAM LYTTLETON, ESQ.,
TOWARD THE CLOSE OF THE YEAR 1748.
How blithely passed the summer’s day!
How bright was every flower!
While friends arrived in circles gay
To visit Damon’s bower!
But now with silent step I range
Along some lonely shore;
And Damon’s bower (alas the change!)
Is gay with friends no more.
Away to crowds and cities borne,
In quest of joy they steer;
While I, alas, am left forlorn
To weep the parting year!
O pensive Autumn, how I grieve
Thy sorrowing face to see!
When languid suns are taking leave
Of every drooping tree.
Ah! let me not with heavy eye
This dying scene survey!
Haste, Winter, haste; usurp the sky;
Complete my bower’s decay!
Ill can I bear the motley cast
Yon sickening leaves retain,
That speak at once of pleasure past,
And bode approaching pain.
Ah, home unblessed! I gaze around,
My distant scenes require,
Where, all in murky vapors drown’d,
Are hamlet, hill, and spire.
Though Thomson, sweet, descriptive bard!
Inspiring Autumn sung;
Yet how should he the months regard,
That stopp’d his flowing tongue?
Ah, luckless months, of all the rest,
To whose hard share it fell!
For sure his was the gentlest breast
That ever sung so well.
And see, the swallows now disown
The roofs they loved before;
Each, like his tuneful genius, flown
To glad some happier shore.
The wood-nymph eyes with pale affright
The sportsman’s frantic deed,
While hounds, and horns, and yells unite
To drown the Muse’s reed.
Ye fields! with blighted herbage brown;
Ye skies! no longer blue;
Too much we feel from Fortune’s frown,
To bear these frowns from you.
Where is the mead’s unsullied green?
The zephyr’s balmy gale?
And where sweet Friendship’s cordial mien
That brighten’d every vale?
What though the vine disclose her dyes,
And boast her purple store,
Not all the vineyard’s rich supplies
Can soothe our sorrows more.
He! he is gone, whose moral strain
Could wit and mirth refine;
He! he is gone, whose social vein
Surpass’d the power of wine.
Fast by the streams he deign’d to praise,
In yon sequester’d grove,
To him a votive urn I raise,
To him and friendly love.
Yes, there, my friend! forlorn and sad,
I 'grave your Thomson’s name;
And there his lyre, which Fate forbad
To sound your growing fame.
There shall my plaintive song recount
Dark themes of hopeless woe;
And faster than the drooping fount,
I’ll teach mine eyes to flow.
There leaves, in spite of Autumn, green
Shall shade the hallow’d ground;
And Spring will there again be seen,
To call forth flowers around.
But no kind suns will bid me share
Once more his social hour;
Ah, Spring! thou never can’st repair
His loss to Damon’s bower.
William Shenstone, 1714–1763.