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Home  »  The Book of the Sonnet  »  Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830–1886)

Hunt and Lee, comps. The Book of the Sonnet. 1867.

IV. October

Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830–1886)

THE PASSIONATE summer ’s dead!—the sky ’s aglow

With roseate flushes of matured desire,

The winds at eve are musical, and low

As sweeping chords of a lamenting lyre,

Far up among the pillared clouds of fire,

Whose pomp of strange procession upwards rolls

With gorgeous blazonry of pictured scrolls,

To celebrate the summer’s past renown;

Ah me! How regally the heavens look down

O’ershadowing beautiful autumnal woods,

And harvest-fields with hoarded increase brown,

And deep-toned majesty of golden floods,

That lift their solemn dirges to the sky,

To swell the purple pomp that floateth by.