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THE WAKING YEAR
A LADY red upon the hill | |
| Her annual secret keeps; | |
| A lady white within the field | |
| In placid lily sleeps! | |
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| The tidy breezes with their brooms | 5 |
| Sweep vail, and hill, and tree! | |
| Prithee, my pretty housewives! | |
| Who may expected be? | |
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| The neighbors do not yet suspect! | |
| The woods exchange a smile,— | 10 |
| Orchard, and buttercup, and bird, | |
| In such a little while! | |
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| And yet how still the landscape stands, | |
| How nonchalant the wood, | |
| As if the resurrection | 15 |
| Were nothing very odd! | |
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AUTUMN
THE MORNS are meeker than they were, | |
| The nuts are getting brown; | |
| The berry’s cheek is plumper, | |
| The rose is out of town. | 20 |
| The maple wears a gayer scarf, | |
| The field a scarlet gown. | |
| Lest I should be old-fashioned, | |
| I ’ll put a trinket on. | |
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BECLOUDED
THE SKY is low, the clouds are mean, | 25 |
| A travelling flake of snow | |
| Across a barn or through a rut | |
| Debates if it will go. | |
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| A narrow wind complains all day | |
| How someone treated him: | 30 |
| Nature, like us, is sometimes caught | |
| Without her diadem. | |
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FRINGED GENTIAN
GOD made a little gentian; | |
| It tried to be a rose | |
| And failed, and all the summer laughed; | 35 |
| But just before the snows | |
| There came a purple creature | |
| That ravished all the hill; | |
| And summer hid her forehead, | |
| And mockery was still. | 40 |
| The frosts were her condition; | |
| The Tyrian would not come | |
| Until the North evoked it:— | |
| “Creator! shall I bloom?” | |
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