Songs and Sonnets (Coleman)/O Summer Days
O SUMMER DAYS.
O Summer Days, how shall we part!
To thee I gave mine inmost heart.
Swift to thy call have been my feet,
I loved thy raptures and thy heat;
Thy sunsets and thy evening star
Have beckoned from their deeps afar.
Thy winds have taught me to forget—
O Summer Days, not yet, not yet!
Thy veery's oft-repeated note
And oriole's song I've learned by rote,
Thy nights have filled me with content,
Thy dawns were as a sacrament.
The silence of thy forest ways
Has given peace to troubled days,
And all thy lovely, leafy things
Have brought the joy a comrade brings.
Beneath thy dome of tender blue
I've learned to measure life anew;
The absent hope, the lost desire
Urge me again to something higher,
And Beauty with her mystic gleam
Has waked again the old-time dream
And charmed away the vain regret—
O Summer Days, not yet, not yet!