Hare Drummer

    Do the boys and girls still go to Siever's
    For cider, after school, in late September?
    Or gather hazel nuts among the thickets
    On Aaron Hatfield's farm when the frosts begin?
    For many times with the laughing girls and boys
    Played I along the road and over the hills
    When the sun was low and the air was cool,
    Stopping to club the walnut tree
    Standing leafless against a flaming west.
    Now, the smell of the autumn smoke,
    And the dropping acorns,
    And the echoes about the vales
    Bring dreams of life.
    They hover over me.
    They question me:
    Where are those laughing comrades?
    How many are with me, how many
    In the old orchards along the way to Siever's,
    And in the woods that overlook
    The quiet water?

Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters was an American poet, biographer, and dramatist. Born in Kansas and raised in Illinois, Masters is best known for his collection of poems entitled "Spoon River Anthology" (1915), which is a series of epitaphs of residents of the fictional small town of Spoon River. His works reflect the everyday lives and frustrations of middle America. Masters also practiced law and wrote biographies for historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain.

Edgar Lee Masters

John Horace Burleson

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Jonathan Swift Somers (Author of the Spooniad)

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Widow McFarlane

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

The Awakening

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

English

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    The earth keeps some vibration going
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Harvest Home Festival.

        In summer time it doth seem good
        To seek the shade of the green wood,
        For it doth banish all our care
        When we gaze on scene so fair.

        And birds do here in branches sing
        So merrily in early spring,
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        Their mutual joys together share.

        Here nature's charming, never rude,
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        Tables had choice fruits of season,
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James McIntyre

Time Of Clearer Twitterings

I.

Time of crisp and tawny leaves,
And of tarnished harvest sheaves,
And of dusty grasses - weeds -
Thistles, with their tufted seeds
Voyaging the Autumn breeze
Like as fairy argosies:
Time of quicker flash of wings,
And of clearer twitterings
In the grove, or deeper shade
Of the tangled everglade, -
Where the spotted water-snake
Coils him in the sunniest brake;
And the bittern, as in fright,
Darts, in sudden, slanting flight,
Southward, while the startled crane
Films his eyes in dreams again.

II

Down along the dwindled creek
We go loitering. We speak
Only with old questionings
Of the dear remembered things
Of the days of long ago,
When the stream seemed thus and so
In our boyish eyes: - The bank
G...

James Whitcomb Riley

Harvest

        Cows in the stall and sheep in the fold;
        Clouds in the west, deep crimson and gold;
            A heron's far flight to a roost somewhere;
            The twitter of killdees keen in the air;
        The noise of a wagon that jolts through the gloam
            On the last load home.

        There are lights in the windows; a blue spire of smoke
        Climbs from the grange grove of elm and oak.
            The smell of the Earth, where the night pours to her
            Its dewy libation, is sweeter than myrrh,
        And an incense to Toil is the smell of the loam
            On the last load home.

John Charles McNeill

The Huskers

It was late in mild October, and the long autumnal rain
Had left the summer harvest-fields all green with grass again;
The first sharp frosts had fallen, leaving all the woodlands gay
With the hues of summer's rainbow, or the meadow flowers of May.
Through a thin, dry mist, that morning, the sun rose broad and red,
At first a rayless disk of fire, he brightened as he sped;
Yet, even his noontide glory fell chastened and subdued,
On the cornfields and the orchards, and softly pictured wood.
And all that quiet afternoon, slow sloping to the night,
He wove with golden shuttle the haze with yellow light;
Slanting through the painted beeches, he glorified the hill;
And, beneath it, pond and meadow lay brighter, greener still.
And shouting boys in woodland haunts caught glimpses of tha...

John Greenleaf Whittier

A Dream Of Autumn.

    Mellow hazes, lowly trailing
    Over wood and meadow, veiling
    Somber skies, with wildfowl sailing
        Sailor-like to foreign lands;
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    Summer's brink, and floodlike sweeping
    Wrecks of roses where the weeping
        Willows wring their helpless hands.

    Flared, like Titan torches flinging
        Flakes of flame and embers, springing
    From the vale the trees stand swinging
        In the moaning atmosphere;
    While in dead'ning-lands the lowing
    Of the cattle, sadder growing,
    Fills the sense to overflowing
        With the sorrow of the year.

    Sorrowfully, yet the sweeter
    Sings the brook in rippled meter
    Under boughs that lithely teeter
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James Whitcomb Riley