Noon

Lost in the sleepy grays and drowsy browns
Of woodlands, smoky with the autumn haze,
Where dull the last, leafed maples, smouldering, blaze
Like ghosts of sachem fires, the month uncrowns
Her frosty hair; and where the forest drowns
The road in darkness, in the rutted ways,
Filled full of freezing rain, her robe she lays
Of tattered gold, and seats herself and frowns.
And at her frown each wood and bosky hill
Shudders with prescience of approaching storm,
Her soul’s familiar fiend, who, with wild broom
Of wind and rain, works her resistless will,
Sweeping the world, and driving with fierce arm
The clouds, like leaves, through the tumultuous gloom.

III

Evening

The shivering wind sits in the oaks, whose limbs,
Twisted and tortured, nevermore are still;
Grief and decay sit with it; they, whose chill
Autumnal touch makes hectic red the rims
Of all the oak-leaves; desolating, dims
The ageratum’s blue that banks the rill;
And splits the milkweed’s pod upon the hill,
And shakes it free of the last seed that swims.
Down goes the day despondent to its close:
And now the sunset’s hands of copper build
A tower of brass, behind whose burning bars,
The Day, in fierce, barbarian repose,
Like some imprisoned Inca sits, hate-filled,
Crowned with the gold corymbus of the stars.

IV

Night

There is a booming in the forest boughs;
Tremendous feet seem trampling through the trees:
The storm is at his wildman revelries,
And earth and heaven echo his carouse.
Night reels with tumult; and, from out her house
Of cloud, the moon looks,—like a face one sees
In nightmare,—hurrying, with pale eyes that freeze,
Stooping above with white, malignant brows.
The isolated oak upon the hill,
That seemed, at sunset, in terrific lands
A Titan head black in a sea of blood,
Now seems a monster harp, whose wild strings thrill
To the vast fingering of innumerable hands—
Spirits of tempest and of solitude.

HALLOWMAS

All hushed of glee,
The last chill bee
Clings wearily
To the dying aster:
The leaves drop faster:
And all around, red as disaster,
The forest crimsons with tree on tree.