AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE

    What visionary tints the year puts on,
  When falling leaves falter through motionless air
    Or humbly cling and shiver to be gone! 
  How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,
    As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills
    The bowl between me and those distant hills,
And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

    No more the landscape holds its wealth apart,
  Making me poorer in my poverty,
    But mingles with my senses and my heart; 10
  My own projected spirit seems to me
    In her own reverie the world to steep;
    ’Tis she that waves to sympathetic sleep,
Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill and tree.

    How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees,
  Clasped by the faint horizon’s languid arms,
    Each into each, the hazy distances! 
  The softened season all the landscape charms;
    Those hills, my native village that embay,
    In waves of dreamier purple roll away, 20
And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.

    Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee
  Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves;
    The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory
  Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves
    Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye
    Of Boaz as the maiden’s glow went by,
So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives.

    The cock’s shrill trump that tells of scattered corn,
  Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates, 30
    Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne,
  Southward, perhaps to far Magellan’s Straits;
    Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails;
  Silently overhead the hen-hawk sails,
With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.

    The sobered robin, hunger-silent now. 
  Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer;
    The chipmunk, on the shingly shag-bark’s bough
  Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear,
    Then drops his nut, and, cheeping, with a bound 40
    Whisks to his winding fastness underground;
The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere.

    O’er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows
  Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman’s call
    Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows;
  The single crow a single caw lets fall;
    And all around me every bush and tree
    Says Autumn’s here, and Winter soon will be,
Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all.

    The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, 50
  Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves,
    And hints at her foregone gentilities
  With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves;
    The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on,
    Glares red as blood across the sinking sun,
As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves.