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I “I BELT the morn with ribboned mist; | |
| With baldricked blue I gird the noon, | |
| And dusk with purple, crimson-kissed, | |
| White-buckled with the hunter’s-moon. | |
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| “These follow me,” the Season says: | 5 |
| “Mine is the frost-pale hand that packs | |
| Their scrips, and speeds them on their ways, | |
| With gypsy gold that weighs their backs.” | |
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II A daybreak horn the Autumn blows, | |
| As with a sun-tanned hand he parts | 10 |
| Wet boughs whereon the berry glows; | |
| And at his feet the red fox starts. | |
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| The leafy leash that holds his hounds | |
| Is loosed; and all the noonday hush | |
| Is startled; and the hillside sounds | 15 |
| Behind the fox’s bounding brush. | |
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| When red dusk makes the western sky | |
| A fire-lit window through the firs, | |
| He stoops to see the red fox die | |
| Among the chestnut’s broken burrs. | 20 |
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| Then fanfaree and fanfaree, | |
| His bugle sounds; the world below | |
| Grows hushed to hear; and two or three | |
| Soft stars dream through the afterglow. | |
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III Like some black host the shadows fall, | 25 |
| And blackness camps among the trees; | |
| Each wildwood road, a Goblin Hall, | |
| Grows populous with mysteries. | |
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| Night comes with brows of ragged storm, | |
| And limbs of writhen cloud and mist; | 30 |
| The rain-wind hangs upon his arm | |
| Like some wild girl who cries unkissed. | |
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| By his gaunt hands the leaves are shed | |
| In headlong troops and nightmare herds; | |
| And, like a witch who calls the dead, | 35 |
| The hill-stream whirls with foaming words. | |
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| Then all is sudden silence and | |
| Dark fear—like his who cannot see, | |
| Yet hears, lost in a haunted land, | |
| Death rattling on a gallow’s-tree. | 40 |
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IV The days approach again; the days | |
| Whose mantles stream, whose sandals drag, | |
| When in the haze by puddled ways | |
| The gnarled thorn seems a crooked hag. | |
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| When rotting orchards reek with rain; | 45 |
| And woodlands crumble, leaf and log; | |
| And in the drizzling yard again | |
| The gourd is tagged with points of fog. | |
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| Now let me seat my soul among | |
| The woods’ dim dreams, and come in touch | 50 |
| With melancholy, sad of tongue | |
| And sweet, who says so much, so much. | |
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