Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, NOVEMBER DAYS, by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

NOVEMBER DAYS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Still days of late november
Last Line: Over the plain, an unmarked drift of white.
Subject(s): November


Still days of late November,
Days when no motionless twig of all the leafless branches
Stirs underneath the even grey of sky;
Days that are but a lifting up, a falling away of pale light,
Indifferent, without sorrow,
Within my heart are dreams -- vague dreams that will not die.

Long, long ago,
Within a garden shade two souls met smiling,
Two souls in which love blazed and flared and broke in waves of light,
Like autumn's dry gold flickering in the leaves.
Long, long ago, one heart
Burnt out and smouldering, turned away from love,
And lay long quenched beneath cold rains of sorrow,
Having gained naught from life but foolish dreams.

Brief days of late November,
You stifle now the rapture and the failure
Under your noonday, with thick folds of gloom.
You bury love, yet living,
Within a vault of darkness,
Where not a cry comes from the sealed-up tomb.

In after days
The spring will break and from its heart come blazing
Flowers of rose and crimson, glowing bright;
But even these and the ripe fruits that shall follow,
The thick ripe fruits red-crowded, heavy, cloying,
Cannot recall the magic of old dreams.

Sad days of late November,
See now again love fails, in you there's parting,
The dying out of the calm steadfast fire.
Great seas of darkness roll between us, sundered,
And for awhile love's last spark seems extinguished.
Would that it never stirred again to life!

The spring returns,
And with the spring a white cross lifts itself,
The symbol of the resurrection dawn;
A love awakes that is not of this world,
A love of hope, of patience, and of suffering:
Time's acid eats away our crumbling strength.

Dead days of late November,
In which the world goes slowly and reluctantly,
Out of a dream of summer, back to sleep;
Return of that bleak presage of the future
When in a lonely world of endless winter
Sunless and loveless I shall strive and weep.

I hear the snow,
It whispers tonelessly,
As it sifts slowly down
Upon the frozen earth from the cold sky:
Slipping and whispering, dropping without effort,
It makes the long road where my feet have wandered
Over the plain, an unmarked drift of white.





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