A VESPER SONNET
This violet eve is like a waveless stream
Celestial, from the rapt horizon’s brink,
Assuaging day with the diviner drink
Of temperate ecstasy, and dews, and dream.
The wine-warm dusks, that brim the valley, gleam
With here and there a lonely casement. Cease
The impetuous purples from the sky of peace,
Like God’s mood in tranquillity supreme.
The encircling uplands east and west lie clear
In thin aërial amber, threaded fine,—
Where bush-fires gnaw the bramble-thickets sere,—
With furtive scarlet. Through the hush benign
One white-throat voices, till the stars appear,
The benediction of the Thought Divine.
THE POTATO HARVEST
A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne
Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky
Washing the ridge; a clamour of crows that fly
In from the wide flats where the spent tides mourn
To yon their rocking roosts in pines wind-torn;
A line of grey snake-fence, that zigzags by
A pond, and cattle; from the homestead nigh
The long deep summonings of the supper horn.
Black on the ridge, against that lonely flush,
A cart, and stoop-necked oxen; ranged beside
Some barrels; and the day-worn harvest-folk,
Here emptying their baskets, jar the hush
With hollow thunders. Down the dusk hillside
Lumbers the wain; and day fades out like smoke.
THE OAT-THRESHING
A little brown old homestead, bowered in trees
That o’er the Autumn landscape shine afar,
Burning with amber and with cinnabar.
A yellow hillside washed in airy seas
Of azure, where the swallow drops and flees.
Midway the slope, clear in the beaming day,
A barn by many seasons beaten grey,
Big with the gain of prospering husbandries.
In billows round the wide red welcoming doors
High piles the golden straw; while from within,
Where plods the team amid the chaffy din,
The loud pulsation of the thresher soars,
Persistent as if earth could not let cease
This happy proclamation of her peace.