Poems (Trask)/November

by Clara Augusta Jones Trask

For works with similar titles, see November.

NOVEMBER.

The fallen leaves, wet with the autumn rain,
 Strew thickly all the lonely forest aisles;
The slant gold sunshine falls as if it fain
 Would warm the earth to summer with its smiles.
Adown the cold, bleak hills the north wind sweeps,
 Fresh from the regions of perpetual snow,
Born in the chill zone where stern Winter keeps
 His gates all locked against the summer's glow.

The gliding brook has hushed its soothing song,
 And all the pasture rills are chilled to rest;
The mighty river, as it creeps along,
 Bears up a coat of armor on its breast;
The trees, like bony skeletons, uplift
 Their naked arms against the cold blue sky,
And at their feet their cast leaves whirl and drift,
 And hide away, like lost brown birds, to die.

A drear, belated robin skims across
 The barren heath; a squirrel, on the wall,
Nibbles his acorn, with no sense of loss,
 For autumn's frosts make the ripe chestnuts fall.
The wild geese, fleeing from the Northern lakes,
 Mingle their croaking with the shrieking wind,
And through the tangle of the copse-wood brakes
 The hunted stag leaps with the hounds behind.

At night the sky above the purple hills,
 And all the rifted waste of cloudy heights,
Are radiant, and through the twilight stills
 Like chapel tapers burn the stars' bright lights;
The circled moon, like Saturn and his rings,
 Looks with cold eye upon the cold below;
The air so full of keen and frosty stings
 Utters its prophecies of coming snow!