ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 15, 2014 16:32:06 GMT -5
I think this poem will be unfamiliar to most members. I have a large poetry collection and this is from a slim paperback published in 1944.
Reflections in aged November
Ross Nichols
When one is at the further end of life I perceive it is as at life's beginnings: the essential dominants simplify, the framework stands out: heartmesh and nerves are springing: or the underlying death-mask and veins. Selective memory is rigid, white stemwood remains after lingblossom, and the spirit perhaps is freer, the envelope less than the gas. So after a cardrive remembering the stratatilted outcrops remain and the blasted oaktrees, the house with the shrunken beams and the old straight-seaking memorials. I saw the tower in the woods, and flowering thistles in the lush lanes, and the earnest war-felled timber, and perceived a faith that burned in slow mouths of the folk under their conscious thinkings and repeated formulae: the old lines of knowledge continuing, life surely renews: the final objective not knowing, we still are content.. I plead very gently to being indeed my own ancestor.
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 15, 2014 16:55:40 GMT -5
Final Autumn
Annie Finch
Maple leaves turn black in the courtyard. Light drives lower and one bluejay crams our cold memories out past the sun,
each time your traces come past the shadows and visit under my looking-glass fingers that lift and block out the sun.
Come—I’ll trace you one final autumn, and you can trace your last homecoming into the snow or the sun.
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 16, 2014 18:50:12 GMT -5
Sad November
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
On the nigh naked tree the robin piped Disconsolate, and thro' the dripping haze The dead weight of the dead leaf bore it down
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 17, 2014 12:02:47 GMT -5
Glad November
John Greenleaf Whittier
Talk not of sad November, when a day Of warm glad sunshine fills the sky of noon, And a wind, borrowed from some morn in June, Stirs the brown grasses and the leafless spray.
On the unposted pool the pillared pines Lay their long shafts of shadow; the small rill Singing a pleasant song of summer still, A line of silver, down the hill-slope shines
Hushed the bird-voices and the hum of bees, In the thin grass the crickets pipe no more; But still the squirrel hoards his winter store, And drops his nut-shells from the shag-bark trees
Softly the dark green hemlocks whisper: high Above the spires of yellow larches show Where the wood-pecker and home-loving crow And jay and nut-hatch winter's threat defy
O gracious beauty, ever new and old! O sights and sounds of nature doubly dear When the low sunshine warms the closing year Of snow-blown fields and waves of Arctic cold!
Close to my heart I fold each lovely thing The sweet day yields; and, not disconsolate, With the calm patience of the woods I wait For leaf and blossom when God gives us spring!
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 17, 2014 12:05:30 GMT -5
The Starlings
Charles Kingsley
Early in Spring time, on raw and windy mornings, Beneath the freezing house-eaves I heard the starlings sing - "Ah dreary March month, is this then a time for building wearily? Sad, sad to think that the year is but begun!"
Late in the Autumn, on still and cloudless evenings, Among the golden reed-beds I heard the starlings sing - "Ah that sweet March month, when we and our mates were courting merrily; Sad, sad to think that the year is all but done!"
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 18, 2014 14:54:42 GMT -5
November
Ted Hughes
The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land Was sodden as the bed of an ancient lake. Treed with iron and was bird less. In the sunk lane The ditch – a seep silent all summer –
Made brown foam with a big voice: that, and my boots On the lanes scrubbed stones, in the gulleyed leaves Against the hill’s hanging silence; Mist silvering the droplets on the bare thorns
Slower than the change of daylight. In a let of the ditch a tramp was bundled asleep. Face tucked down into beard, drawn in Under his hair like a hedgehog’s. I took him for dead,
But his stillness separated from the death From the rotting grass and the ground. The wind chilled, And a fresh comfort tightened through him, Each hand stuffed deeper into the other sleeve.
His ankles, bound with sacking and hairy hand, Rubbed each other, resettling. The wind hardened; A puff shook a glittering from the thorns, And again the rains’ dragging grey columns
Smudged the farms. In a moment The fields were jumping and smoking; the thorns Quivered, riddled with the glassy verticals. I stayed on under the welding cold
Watching the tramp’s face glisten and the drops on his coat Slash and darken. I thought what strong trust Slept in him- as the trickling furrows slept, And the thorn roots in their grip on darkness;
And the buried stones taking the weight of winter; The hill where the hare crouched with clenched teeth. Rain plastered the land till it was shinning Like hammered lead, and I ran, and in the rushing wood
Shuttered by a black oak leaned. The Keeper’s gibbet had owls and hawks By the neck, weasels, a gang of cats, crows: Some stiff, weightless, twirled like dry bark bits
In the drilling rain. some still had their shape, Had their pride with it; hung, chins on chests, Patient to outwait these worst days that beat Their crowns bare and dripped from their feet.
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 18, 2014 14:55:08 GMT -5
Waiting the close
Walter Savage Landor
Mild is the parting year, and sweet The odour of the falling spray; Life passes on more rudely fleet, And balmless is its closing day. I wait its close, I court its gloom, But mourn that never must there fall Or on my breast or on my tomb The tear that would have soothed it all.
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 19, 2014 9:25:51 GMT -5
Tears, idle tears
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather in the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld, Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love beneath the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; So sad, so strange, the days that are no more
Dear as remember'd kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 19, 2014 9:27:48 GMT -5
Late Leaves
Walter Savage Landor
The leaves are falling; so am I; The few late flowers have moisture in the eye; So have I too. Scarcely on any bough is heard Joyous, or even unjoyous, bird The whole wood through
Winter may come; he brings but nigher His circle (yearly narrowing) to the fire Where old friends meet. Let him; now heaven is overcast, And spring and summer both are past, And all things sweet
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 20, 2014 16:57:07 GMT -5
This Autumn Morning
Robert Browning
Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth, This autumn morning! How he sets his bones To bask i' the sun, and thrusts our knees and feet For the ripple to run over in his mirth: Listening the while, where on the heap of stones The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 21, 2014 16:09:00 GMT -5
The Death of the Flowers
William Cullen Bryant
THE MELANCHOLY days have come the saddest of the year Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sere; Heaped in the hollows of the grove the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust and to the rabbit's tread; The robin and the wren are flown and from the shrubs the jay 5 And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.
Where are the flowers the fair young flowers that lately sprang and stood In brighter light and softer airs a beauteous sisterhood? Alas! they all are in their graves the gentle race of flowers Are lying in their lowly beds with the fair and good of ours. 10 The rain is falling where they lie but the cold November rain Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.
The wind-flower and the violet they perished long ago And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow; But on the hill the goldenrod and the aster in the wood 15 And the blue sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven as falls the plague on men And the brightness of their smile was gone from upland glade and glen.
And now when comes the calm mild day as still such days will come To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home; 20 When the sound of dropping nuts is heard though all the trees are still And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.
And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died 25 The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side. In the cold moist earth we laid her when the forests cast the leaf And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief: Yet not unmeet it was that one like that young friend of ours So gentle and so beautiful should perish with the flowers.
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 21, 2014 16:12:09 GMT -5
Come months, come away
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The warm sun is falling, the bleak wind is wailing; The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the year On the earth her deathbed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying, Come months, come away, From November till 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 night 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, Put on white, black, and gray, Let your light sisters play - Ye, follow the bier Of the cold dead year, And make her grave green with tear on tear
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 22, 2014 11:50:08 GMT -5
Another by Ross Nichols:
Orcus
The river under the trees passes into the shadows from the apparent, bearing on its silent water the barge that carries the emblems of death and of life fallen leaf crowned knives, ringed ankh and the wide seed winging
In darkness descends to fields of the lotus Nilus, where the ripple breaks dimly and slow are the oarsmen phantasmal, the fir-cone and seeds trodden by the brown shades minimal, the life-spark in ember and the death-flower stilly
The autumn stream with its leafage choked to the brim-seeds moles through the roots of the steep white hillside of beauty; sun lowers, and the rain's realm sweeps over earth without ceasing as brown fire falls from the wind-harried forest
Under the trees the river passes on into shadow bearing the barge with emblems of life and death
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 22, 2014 11:53:37 GMT -5
Care in Autumn
Thomas Chatterton
When Autumn, bleak and sunburnt, do appear, With his gold hand gilting the falling leaf, Bringing up winter to fulfil the year, Bearing upon his back the riped sheaf; When all the hills with woody seed are white, When levying fires, and lemes, do meet from far the sight; When the fair apple, rudde as even sky, Do bend the tree unto the fructile ground, When juicy pears, and berries of black dye, Do dance in air and call the eyne around; Then, be the even foul, or even fair, Methinks my hearte's joy is stained with some care
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Nov 23, 2014 16:55:01 GMT -5
Fergus Falling
Galway Kinnell
He climbed to the top of one of those million white pines set out across the emptying pastures of the fifties - some program to enrich the rich and rebuke the forefathers who cleared it all at once with ox and axe - climbed to the top, probably to get out of the shadow not of those forefathers but of this father and saw for the first time down in its valley, Bruce Pond, giving off its little steam in the afternoon,
pond where Clarence Akley came on Sunday mornings to cut down the cedars around the shore, I'd sometimes hear the slow spondees of his work, he's gone, where Milton Norway came up behind me while I was fishing and stood awhile before I knew he was there, he's the one who put the cedar shingles on the house, some have curled or split, a few have blown off, he's gone, where Gus Newland logged in the cold snap of '58, the only man will- ing to go into those woods that never got warmer than ten below, he's gone, pond where two wards of the state wandered on Halloween, the Na- tional Guard searched for them in November, in vain, the next fall a hunter found their skeletons huddled together, in vain, they're gone, pond where an old fisherman in a rowboat sits, drowning hooked worms, when he goes he's replaced and is never gone,
and when Fergus saw the pond for the first time in the clear evening, saw its oldness down there in its old place in the valley, he became heavier suddenly in his bones the way fledglings do just before they fly, and the soft pine cracked . . .
I would not have heard his cry if my electric saw had been working, its carbide teeth speeding through the bland spruce of our time, or burning black arcs into some scavenged hemlock plank, like dark circles under eyes when the brain thinks too close to the skin, but I was sawing by hand and I heard that cry as though he were attacked; we ran out, when we bent over him he said, "Galway, In¨¦s, I saw a pond!" His face went gray, his eyes fluttered close a frightening moment . . .
Yes - a pond that lets off its mist on clear afternoons of August, in that valley to which many have come, for their reasons, from which many have gone, a few for their reasons, most not, where even now and old fisherman only the pinetops can see sits in the dry gray wood of his rowboat, waiting for pickerel.
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