Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830–1886)

THE PASSIONATE summer ’s dead!—the sky ’s aglow

With roseate flushes of matured desire,

The winds at eve are musical, and low

As sweeping chords of a lamenting lyre,

Far up among the pillared clouds of fire,

Whose pomp of strange procession upwards rolls

With gorgeous blazonry of pictured scrolls,

To celebrate the summer’s past renown;

Ah me! How regally the heavens look down

O’ershadowing beautiful autumnal woods,

And harvest-fields with hoarded increase brown,

And deep-toned majesty of golden floods,

That lift their solemn dirges to the sky,

To swell the purple pomp that floateth by.