Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, DEDICATIONS AND INSCRIPTIONS: 2. EPILOGUE: 5TH OCTOBER 1896, by GORDON BOTTOMLEY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

DEDICATIONS AND INSCRIPTIONS: 2. EPILOGUE: 5TH OCTOBER 1896, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Autumn falls quickly on us hereabout
Last Line: The evening lowing of tense-uddered kine.


AUTUMN falls quickly on us hereabout;
Wreckage of roses strews the garden-ground;
Stripped are the orchards of their gleaming fruit;
Something of Winter's wan and weary round
Tinges the days, and mournful is the sound
Of wind and sea, while ever a mist of rain
Hangs in the trees and blurs the window-pane.

Now, standing in the twilight of the year,
Awaiting its oncoming night of death,
Into the darkness slowly creeping near
Along the road as of a desolate heath
We look, and linger ere we pass beneath
Its heavy languor of sleepy short-lived days,
As tired wayfarers look into the haze

Of gloom that gathers for a moonless night,
Knowing their haven is a far-off land;
Thus lingering, long we for a world more bright,
The world of Springtide where on either hand
Of every lane the budding hawthorns stand,
Waiting to welcome May with bursts of bloom
And launch the Summer on seas of deep perfume.

There, in the year's high tide, will be no need
Of wavering fantasies that seem scarce nought,
But in dark days it may be some will heed
The things that never were, the things forgot,
Which I to soothe my weariness have wrought:
If any praise them, let his praise be paid
Unto my master who is lying dead.

As children in the twilight fashion tales
From mighty stories that their elders love
(Crouching, half fearful of their own faint spells),
So in song-working I have tried to move
Within his wake who had great skill thereof,
The weaver of melodies both sweet and strong,
The eager viking of the ways of song.

The rain has slackened slowly, seeming spent;
The valley is fulfilled of silences
All intertangled and together blent,
The silence of dead winds among the trees,
The silence where the roof-smoke spires with ease.
O silent land, even now one sound is thine --
The evening lowing of tense-uddered kine.





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