Nothing Gold Can Stay

Freehold, NJ, November 2007

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay.
                                
              -  Robert Frost (1923)

Ode to Autumn

  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-eaves 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 budding more,
  And still more, later flowers for the bees,
  Until they think warm days will never cease;
  For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.

 Who hath not seen thee 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,
 Drowsed 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 redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

                                                   - John Keats