To Autumn

(album: She Walks In Beauty - 2021)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel, to set a budding more
And still more, later flowers for the bees
Until they think warm days will never cease
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells

Who hath not seen oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies