Poems of Madison Cawein Vol. 3 — Sunset in Autumn

SUNSET IN AUTUMN

Blood-colored oaks, that stand against a sky of gold and brass;

Gaunt slopes, on which the bleak leaves glow of brier and sassafras, And broom-sedge strips of smoky pink and pearl-gray clumps of grass In which, beneath the ragged sky, the rain pools gleam like glass.

From west to east, from wood to wood, along the forest-side, The winds,--the sowers of the Lord,--with thunderous footsteps stride;

Their stormy hands rain acorns down; and mad leaves, wildly dyed, Like tatters of their rushing cloaks, stream round them far and wide.

The frail leaf-cricket in the weeds sounds its far fairy-bell;

And like a torch of phantom ray the milkweed’s windy shell Glimmers; while, wrapped in withered dreams, the wet, autumnal smell Of loam and leaf, like Fall’s own ghost, steals over field and dell.

The oaks, against a copper sky--o’er which, like some black lake Of Dis, bronze clouds, (like surges fringed with sullen fire) break-- Loom sombre as Doom’s citadel above the vales that make A pathway to a land of mist the moon’s pale feet shall take.

Now, dyed with burning carbuncle, a limbo-litten pane, Red in wild walls of storm, the west opens to hill and plain, On which the wild-geese ink themselves, a far triangled train;

And then the shuttering clouds close down--and night it comes again.