38. AUTUMN. A DIRGE. THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the Year On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying. Come, Months, come away, From November to May, In your saddest array; Follow the bier Of the dead cold Year, And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre. The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling, The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling For the Year; The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone To his dwelling. Come, Months, come away; Let your light sisters play — Of the dead cold Year, And make her grave green with tear on tear. - PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 39. ODE TO AUTUMN. I SAW old Autumn in the misty morn Where are the songs of Summer? With the sun, Oping the dusky eyelids of the south, Till shade and silence waken up as one, And Morning sings with a warm odorous mouth. Undazzled at noon-day, And tear with horny beak their lustrous eyes. Where are the blooms of Summer? In the west, When the mild Eve by sudden Night is prest Where is the pride of Summer, the green prime, — On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime Trembling, and one upon the old oak tree! Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew, The squirrel gloats o'er his accomplish'd hoard, The sweets of Summer in their luscious cells; And sighs her tearful spells Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain. Upon a mossy stone, She sits and reckons up the dead and gone, O go and sit with her, and be o'ershaded If only for the rose that died, whose doom Enough of bitter fruits the earth doth bear, - THOMAS HOOD. 40. TO AUTUMN. SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness! With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells And still more, later flowers for the bees, For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers; And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The redbreast whistles from the garden-croft, And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. — JOHN KEATS. 41. ODE TO THE WEST WIND. I. O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill |