The end of summer is such a unique time, so many things seem possible. It’s like another kind of New Year’s resolution time for many people. School starting again only fuels this sense of ‘back to business’ freshness. These are two pieces that reflect the conflicting seasonal feelings of ‘ending’ and yet beginning anew:
Courtesy: Katie O’Neil
Declining Summer by Clinton Scollard
Reluctantly the summer goes;
The crimson radiance of the rose
Is ashen in the garden-close.
There is a pleading plaintiveness
In the long hill-wind’s low caress,
Heart-moving and yet passionless.
The noons are heavy with the heat,
And still, save for the thin-drawn beat
Of the cicada, shrilly-sweet.
Faintly the groves begin to grieve,
And grows more mournful eve by eve
The music-web the thrushes weave.
And Love, erewhile in vernal guise,
Adown the land, in pensive wise,
Now wanders with averted eyes.
The Last Day of Summer by William Alexander
All the sweet summer azure is not fled–
What hath the woodland, then, to do with grief?
The apparition of a yellow leaf,
The half-suspected russet overhead–
Of this it dreams, and is disquieted.
Snowdrops and other dainty things as brief,
Whereof the young anemones were chief,
The tremulous anemones are dead.
Long since the snowdrops have been fain to die;
Long since the anemones have pass’d away:
Some colour’d leaves discolour every morn–
Touch’d by the thought of which cronology
The trees have something that they long to say,
Inaudible, multitudinous, forlorn.
