free-verse56 lines
The Death Of Autumn.
by Kate Seymour MacleanDiscrowned and desolate,
And wandering with dim eyes and faded hair,
Singing sad songs to comfort her despair,
Grey Autumn meets her fate.
Forsaken and alone
She haunts the ruins of her queenly state,
Like banished Eve at Eden's flaming gate,
Making perpetual moan.
Crazed with her grief she moves
Along the banks of the frost-charmed rills,
And all the hollows of the wooded hills,
Searching for her lost loves.
From verdurous base to cope,
The sunny hill-sides, and sweet pasture lands,
Where bubbling brooks reach ever-dimpled hands
Along the amber slope,--
And valleys drowsed between,
In the rich purple of the vintage time,
When cups of gold that drop with fragrant wine,
From orchard branches lean;--
And far beyond them, spread
Broad fields thick set with sheaves of yellow wheat,
Where scarlet poppies, slumberously sweet,
Glow with a dusky red--
To the remotest zone
Of hazy woodland pencilled on the sky,
On whose far spires the clouds of sunset lie,--
She held her regal throne!
Queen of a princely race,
Whose ministers were all the elements;
Sunshine, and rain, and dew she did dispense
With a right royal grace.
Now, not a breath of air,
Nor sunbeam, nor the voice of beast or bird,
Stirring the lonely woods, hath any word
To comfort her despair.
Insidious, day by day
A smouldering flame, a lurid crimson creeps
Into the ashy whiteness of her cheeks,
And burns her life away.
The cavernous woods are dumb!
Through their oracular depths and secret nooks,
To the mute supplication of her looks
No mystic voices come
And through the still grey air
The night comes down, and hangs her lamp on high,
Like a wan lily blossomed on the sky,
Shining so ghostly fair,
Or looming up the heights,
Those awful spectres of the frozen zone
Splinter the crystal of heaven's sapphire dome,
With arrowy-glancing lights.
The while hoarse night winds rave,
The old year looking backward to his prime
With dim fond eyes, down the last steps of time
Goes maundering to his grave!