BLOOD-COLOURED oaks, that stand against a sky of gold and brass; Gaunt slopes, on which the bleak leaves glow of brier and sassafras, And broom-sedge strips of smoky-pink and pearl -- gray clumps of grass In which, beneath the ragged sky, the rain pools gleam like glass. From West to East, from wood to wood, along the forest-side, The winds, -- the sowers of the Lord, -- with thunderous footsteps stride; Their stormy hands rain acorns down; and mad leaves, wildly dyed, Like tatters of their rushing cloaks, stream round them far and wide. The frail leaf-cricket in the weeds rings a faint fairy bell; And like a torch of phantom ray the milkweed's windy shell Glimmers; while, wrapped in withered dreams, the wet autumnal smell Of loam and leaf, like some sad ghost, steals over field and dell. The oaks, against a copper sky -- o'er which, like some black lake Of Dis, bronze clouds, like surges fringed with sullen fire, break -- Loom sombre as Doom's citadel above the vales that make A pathway to a land of mist the moon's pale feet shall take. Now, dyed with burning carbuncle, a limbo-litten pane, Within its walls of storm, the West opens to hill and plain, On which the wild-geese ink themselves, a far triangled train, And then the shuttering clouds close down -- and night is here again. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...EBB by EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY A FAERY SONG, SUNG BY THE PEOPLE OF FAERY OVER DIARMUID by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS WRITTEN IN IRELAND by MARY (CUMBERLAND) ALCOCK GOOD LUCK by JOHANNA AMBROSIUS PERCH FISHING by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN RECOGNITION by HARRY RANDOLPH BLYTHE |