Dear Annie: Hope you are all having a lovely fall. Please see below some poems that help embrace the season.
“The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Butler Yeats
“The trees are in their autumn beauty, / The woodland paths are dry, / Under the October twilight the water / Mirrors a still sky; / Upon the brimming water among the stones / Are nine-and-fifty swans. / The nineteenth autumn has come upon me / Since I first made my count; / I saw, before I had well finished, / All suddenly mount / And scatter wheeling in great broken rings / Upon their clamorous wings … / But now they drift on the still water, / Mysterious, beautiful; / Among what rushes will they build, / By what lake’s edge or pool / Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day / To find they have flown away?”
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost
“Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only so an hour. / Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day. / Nothing gold can stay.”
“Sonnet 73” by William Shakespeare
“That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. / In me thou see’st the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west, / Which by and by black night doth take away, / Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. / In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, / As the death-bed whereon it must expire, / Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by. / This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
“Late October” by Maya Angelou
“Only lovers / see the fall / a signal end to endings / a gruffish gesture alerting / those who will not be alarmed / that we begin to stop / in order to begin / again.”
“When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats
“When you are old and grey and full of sleep, / And nodding by the fire, take down this book, / And slowly read, and dream of the soft look / Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; / How many loved your moments of glad grace, / And loved your beauty with love false or true, / But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face; / And bending down beside the glowing bars, / Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled / And paced upon the mountains overhead / And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”
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