Classic Poem

Once more, once more, with fateful sombre tread,
The wheeling year brings splendid Autumn in,
Hushed with sad dreams of memory and the dead,
And icy touch of Winter sere and thin:
Slowly with thoughtful pace the hours go round
While, leaf by leaf, the year slips faltering to the ground.

With what a glory lifts the morning light
O'er mists and dreams beyond the dripping woods,
Where ambering brooks steal under wakening night,
Mirroring in mists the year's bright moods
Of morning, peace and life and leafy glow;
Soon, soon, too sadly soon, ghost-wound in ghostly snow.

Down past the rich, ripe splendors of the year,
The glad days pale and sadden to the Fall,
Loosening, as memory lets go tear by tear,
The sweet old thoughts, the dreams beyond recall;
The splendid hopes, the joys, the golden gleam,
That now fade out in mists beyond the hills of dream.

And now when nights grow old and days decline,
And veiled September glories all the world
With those glad lights of Autumn's hues divine,
By hill and stream in azure vapors furled,
Over the earth a solemn rapture flows
Of death's sad doomful march where all that's mortal goes.

To him who, wandering o'er the upland fields,
Or by some noonday shrunken slumbering stream,
Where reverie her sweetest visions yields
In realms of inward thought and reverent dream,
There comes a sense of sadness undefined,
That speaks in each dead leaf, or whispers down the wind.

All day far out across the azure hills,
The splendid ruined woods all wrecked with rains,
Or river reaches, where the distance fills,
With wine of softness, all the haze-lit plains;
And lonely uplands where some garrulous jay
Reverberates his note along the lonesome day;

Here 'mid these austere glories of the year,
The spirit of lofty sadness dwells alone;
Where, hushed, the lorn heart grieves without a tear,
In this high house where winds like ocean moan;
Or wild-blown sunsets, where bleak woodlands sway
About the dying borders of the splendid desolate day.

So fades September. Down each country lane,
Where withered the summer in the late August days,
And weeds, once radiant, drenched of wind and rain,
Now bronzed and ragged, linger along the ways;
Here aster and gentian lift their fringed blue,
Like some sweet second summer, the haze-filled sunlight through.

Near and afar by wood and field and stream,
There sleeps an eerie mantle of misty light,
Transforming all, building this mid-day dream,
Like some ghost-phantom of the pale moonlight;
Where all the distance islanded in a breath,
Seems some illusion built from out the fogs of death.

Soon, soon, too soon, this pageantry will pass;
And all the gaudy garments the world puts on,
Of crimsoning leaf, and mists and bronzed grass,
Like some magician's dream, be vanished and gone;
Leaving the year a hollow iron urn,
Wherein no more love's fires do glimmer and leap and burn.

Nor should we sorrow more than sadness ought,
Nor grieve to tread this abbey of life's years;
Is there not splendid beauty in the thought
That we have such great endings of our tears; —
That very Nature puts her glories on,
In these sad haunted days, for all her bright ones gone.

Even as we dream, in maddening rage doth rouse
Old lorn October, storm bloused, Autumn blown;
Roaring like ocean upon this ruined house,
Shaking in thunders its desolate splendors down;
Till not one leaf goes shuddering in its flight,
Where build in icy caverns the windy fires of night.