To Ellen, at the South

The green grass is growing,

The morning wind is in it, 

'Tis a tune worth the knowing, 

Though it change every minute. '

Tis a tune of the spring, 

Every year plays it over, 

To the robin on the wing, 

To the pausing lover. 

O'er ten thousand thousand acres 

Goes light the nimble zephyr, 

The flowers, tiny feet of shakers, 

Worship him ever. 

Hark to the winning sound! 

They summon thee, dearest, 

Saying; "We have drest for thee the ground, 

Nor yet thou appearest. 

"O hasten, 'tis our time, 

Ere yet the red summer 

Scorch our delicate prime, 

Loved of bee, the tawny hummer. 

"O pride of thy race! 

Sad in sooth it were to ours, 

If our brief tribe miss thy face,— 

We pour New England flowers. 

 "Fairest! choose the fairest members 

Of our lithe society; 

June's glories and September's 

Show our love and piety. 

 "Thou shalt command us all, 

April's cowslip, summer's clover 

To the gentian in the fall, 

Blue-eyed pet of blue-eyed lover. 

 "O come, then, quickly come, 

We are budding, we are blowing, 

And the wind which we perfume 

Sings a tune that's worth thy knowing."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, preacher, and member of the Transcendentalists

Sestina

September rain falls on the house.

In the failing light, the old grandmother

sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

--Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), poet and translator, US Poet Laureate 1949-1950, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner

A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stains and Crags

 A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags, 

 A rude and natural causeway, interposed 

 Between the water and a winding slope 

 Of copse and thicket, leaves the eastern shore 

 Of Grasmere safe in its own privacy: 

 And there myself and two beloved Friends, 

 One calm September morning, ere the mist 

 Had altogether yielded to the sun, 

 Sauntered on this retired and difficult way. ----

 Ill suits the road with one in haste; but we 

 Played with our time; and, as we strolled along, 

 It was our occupation to observe 

 Such objects as the waves had tossed ashore-- 

 Feather, or leaf, or weed, or withered bough, 

 Each on the other heaped, along the line 

 Of the dry wreck. And, in our vacant mood, 

 Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft 

 Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard, 

 That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake, 

 Suddenly halting now--a lifeless stand! 

 And starting off again with freak as sudden; 

 In all its sportive wanderings, all the while, 

 Making report of an invisible breeze 

 That was its wings, its chariot, and its horse, 

 Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul. --

And often, trifling with a privilege 

Alike indulged to all, we paused, one now, 

And now the other, to point out, perchance 

 To pluck, some flower or water-weed, too fair 

 Either to be divided from the place 

 On which it grew, or to be left alone 

 To its own beauty. Many such there are, 

 Fair ferns and flowers, and chiefly that tall fern, 

 So stately, of the queen Osmunda named; 

 Plant lovelier, in its own retired abode 

 On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side 

 Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere, 

 Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance. --

 So fared we that bright morning: from the fields 

 Meanwhile, a noise was heard, the busy mirth 

 Of reapers, men and women, boys and girls. 

 Delighted much to listen to those sounds, 

 And feeding thus our fancies, we advanced 

 Along the indented shore; when suddenly, 

 Through a thin veil of glittering haze was seen 

 Before us, on a point of jutting land, 

 The tall and upright figure of a Man 

 Attired in peasant's garb, who stood alone, 

 Angling beside the margin of the lake. 

 "Improvident and reckless," we exclaimed, 

 "The Man must be, who thus can lose a day 

 Of the mid harvest, when the labourer's hire 

 Is ample, and some little might be stored 

 Wherewith to cheer him in the winter time." 

 Thus talking of that Peasant, we approached 

 Close to the spot where with his rod and line 

 He stood alone; whereat he turned his head 

 To greet us--and we saw a Man worn down 

 By sickness, gaunt and lean, with sunken cheeks 

 And wasted limbs, his legs so long and lean 

 That for my single self I looked at them, 

 Forgetful of the body they sustained.-- 

 Too weak to labour in the harvest field, 

 The Man was using his best skill to gain 

 A pittance from the dead unfeeling lake 

 That knew not of his wants. I will not say 

 What thoughts immediately were ours, nor how 

 The happy idleness of that sweet morn, 

 With all its lovely images, was changed 

 To serious musing and to self-reproach. 

 Nor did we fail to see within ourselves 

 What need there is to be reserved in speech, 

 And temper all our thoughts with charity. --

Therefore, unwilling to forget that day, My Friend, 

Myself, and She who then received 

 The same admonishment, have called the place 

 By a memorial name, uncouth indeed 

 As e'er by mariner was given to bay 

 Or foreland, on a new-discovered coast; 

 And POINT RASH-JUDGMENT is the name it bears.

--William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet and British poet laureate

The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,

She looked so limp and bedraggled, 

So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle, 

Or a wizened aster in late September, 

I brought her back in again 

For a new routine-- 

Vitamins, water, and whatever 

Sustenance seemed sensible 

At the time: she'd lived 

So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer, 

Her shriveled petals falling 

On the faded carpet, the stale 

Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves. 

(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.) 

 The things she endured!-- 

The dumb dames shrieking half the night 

Or the two of us, alone, both seedy, 

Me breathing booze at her, 

She leaning out of her pot toward the window. 

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me-- 

And that was scary-- 

So when that snuffling cretin of a maid 

Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can, 

I said nothing. 

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week, 

I was that lonely.

-- Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) American poet and teacher,  winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1954, for The Waking, two-time National Book Award winner

On an Apple-Ripe September Morning

On an apple-ripe September morning 

Through the mist-chill fields I went
With a pitch-fork on my shoulder
Less for use than for devilment.

The threshing mill was set-up, I knew,
In Cassidy's haggard last night,
And we owed them a day at the threshing
Since last year. O it was delight

To be paying bills of laughter
And chaffy gossip in kind
With work thrown in to ballast
The fantasy-soaring mind.

As I crossed the wooden bridge I wondered
As I looked into the drain
If ever a summer morning should find me
Shovelling up eels again.

And I thought of the wasps' nest in the bank
And how I got chased one day
Leaving the drag and the scraw-knife behind,
How I covered my face with hay.

The wet leaves of the cocksfoot
Polished my boots as I
Went round by the glistening bog-holes
Lost in unthinking joy.

I'll be carrying bags to-day, I mused,
The best job at the mill
With plenty of time to talk of our loves
As we wait for the bags to fill.

Maybe Mary might call round...
And then I came to the haggard gate,
And I knew as I entered that I had come
Through fields that were part of no earthly estate.

-- Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), Irish poet and novelist

September Midnight

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.

The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
Tired with summer.

Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.

Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.

-- Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), St. Louis-born America poet, winner of what would eventually be the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1918.

September, the First Day of School

I

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.
Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible
Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

II

A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler's Law,
As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,
The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form
Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.

-- Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) American poet, two time poet laureate of the United States (1963-1964 and 1988-1990) and professor at Washington University in St. Louis.