Color
Record No. 29, Side A:
This is
today’s poem:
The Death
of the Flowers
By William
Cullen Bryant
The
melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of
wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear.
Heaped in
the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They
rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.
The robin
and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,
And from
the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.
Where are
the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood
In
brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas!
they all are in their graves; the gentle race of flowers
Are lying
in their lowly beds with the fair and good of ours.
The rain
is falling where they lie; but the cold November rain
Calls not
from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.
The
wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,
And the
brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on
the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the
yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell
the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the
brightness of their smile was gone from upland, glade, and glen.
And now,
when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,
To call
the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;
When the
sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,
And
twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill;
The
south-wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs
to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.
And then
I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,
The fair
meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side.
In the
cold moist earth we laid her, when the forests cast the leaf,
And we
wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief;
Yet not
unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,
So gentle
and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.
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