| SPRING and Summer, Fall and Winter and Spring | |
| After each other drifting, past my window drifting! | |
| And I lay so many years watching them drift and counting | |
| The years till a terror came in my heart at times, | |
| With the feeling that I had become eternal; at last | 5 |
| My hundredth year was reached! And still I lay | |
| Hearing the tick of the clock, and the low of cattle | |
| And the scream of a jay flying through falling leaves! | |
| Day after day alone in a room of the house | |
| Of a daughter-in-law stricken with age and gray. | 10 |
| And by night, or looking out of the window by day | |
| My thought ran back, it seemed, through infinite time | |
| To North Carolina and all my girlhood days, | |
| And John, my John, away to the war with the British, | |
| And all the children, the deaths, and all the sorrows. | 15 |
| And that stretch of years like a prairie in Illinois | |
| Through which great figures passed like hurrying horsemen, | |
| Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Clay. | |
| O beautiful young republic for whom my John and I | |
| Gave all of our strength and love! | 20 |
| And O my John! | |
| Why, when I lay so helpless in bed for years, | |
| Praying for you to come, was your coming delayed? | |
| Seeing that with a cry of rapture, like that I uttered | |
| When you found me in old Virginia after the war, | 25 |
| I cried when I beheld you there by the bed, | |
| As the sun stood low in the west growing smaller and fainter | |
| In the light of your face! | |
