SUNSET IN AUTUMN
Blood-colored 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 sounds its far 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 Fall’s own ghost, steals over field and dell.
The oaks, against a copper sky—o’er which, like some black lake
Of Dis, bronze 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,
Red in wild walls 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 it comes again.
CONTENT
When I behold how some pursue
Fame that is Care’s embodiment,
Or fortune, whose false face looks true,—
An humble home with sweet content
Is all I ask for me and you.
An humble home, where pigeons coo,
Whose path leads under breezy lines
Of frosty-berried cedars to
A gate, one mass of trumpet-vines,
Is all I ask for me and you.