Mid-August / Duncan Campbell Scott

Mid-August

From the upland hidden,
    Where the hill is sunny
    Tawny like pure honey
    In the August heat, 

Memories float unbidden
    Where the thicket serries
    Fragrant with ripe berries
    And the milk-weed sweet.

Like a prayer-mat holy
    Are the patterned mosses
    Which the twin-flower crosses
    With her flowerless vine;
In fragile melancholy
    The pallid ghost flowers hover
    As if to guard and cover
    The shadow of a shrine.

Where the pine-linnet lingered
    The pale water searches,
    The roots of gleaming birches
    Draw silver from the lake;
The ripples, liquid-fingered,
    Plucking the root-layers,
    Fairy like lute players
    Lulling music make.

O to lie here brooding
    Where the pine-tree column
    Rises dark and solemn
    To the airy lair,
Where, the day eluding,
    Night is couched dream laden,
    Like a deep witch-maiden
    Hidden in her hair.

In filmy evanescence
    Wraithlike scents assemble,
    Then dissolve and tremble
    A little until they die;
Spirits of the florescence
    Where the bees searched and tarried
    Till the blossoms all were married
    In the days before July.

Light has lost its splendour,
    Light refined and sifted,
    Cool light and dream drifted
    Ventures even where,
(Seeping silver tender)
    In the dim recesses,
    Trembling mid her tresses,
    Hides the maiden hair.

Covered with the shy-light,
    Filling in the hushes,
    Slide the tawny thrushes
    Calling to their broods,
Hoarding till the twilight
    The song that made for noon-days
    Of the amorous June days
    Preludes and interludes.

The joy that I am feeling
    Is there something in it
    Unlike the warble the linnet
    Phrases and intones?
Or is a like thought stealing
    With a rapture fine, free
    Through the happy pine tree
    Ripening her cones?

In some high existence
    In another planet
    Where their poets cannot
    Know our birds and flowers,
Does the same persistence
    Give the dreams they issue
    Something like the tissue
    Of these dreams of ours?

O to lie athinking —
    Moods and whims! I fancy
    Only necromancy
    Could the web unroll,
Only somehow linking
    Beauties that meet and mingle
    In this quiet dingle
    With the beauty of the whole.

~~
Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947)
from Lundy's Lane, and other poems, 1916

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

Duncan Campbell Scott biography

Jared Rover, Cabot Trail Nova Scotia, August 2017. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

The Landscape / William Shenstone

    Samuel Evans (1762-1835), The Leasowes (Shenstone's estate), 1788. Wikipedia Commons.

Song II.  The Landscape

How pleased within my native bowers
    Erewhile I pass'd the day!
Was ever scene so deck'd with flowers?
    Were ever flowers so gay?

How sweetly smiled the hill, the vale,
    And all the landscape round!
The river gliding down the dale,
    The hill with beeches crown'd!

But now, when urged by tender woes
    I speed to meet my dear,
    That hill and stream my zeal oppose,
And check my fond career.

No more, since Daphne was my theme,
    Their wonted charms I see:
That verdant hill, and silver stream,
    Divide my love and me.

~~
William Shenstone (1714-1763)
from Poetical Works
(edited by George Gilfilan), 1854

William Shenstone biography

"The Landskip" (The Landscape) read for LibriVox.org. Courtesy PoemsCafe.

A Song in August / Francis Sherman

A Song in August

O gold is the West and gold the river-waters
Washing past the sides of my yellow birch canoe,
Gold are the great drops that fall from my paddle,
The far-off hills cry a golden word of you.

I can almost see you! Where its own shadow
Creeps down the hill’s side, gradual and slow.
There you stand waiting; the goldenrod and thistle
Glad of you beside them — the fairest thing they know.

Down the worn foot-path, the tufted pines behind you,
Grey sheep between,— unfrightened as you pass;
Swift through the sun-glow, I to my loved one
Come, striving hard against the long trailing grass.

Soon shall I ground on the shining gravel-reaches:
Through the thick alders you will break your way:
Then your hand in mine, and our path is on the waters,—
For us the long shadows and the end of day.

Whither shall we go? See, over to the westward,
An hour of precious gold standeth still for you and me;
Still gleams the grain, all yellow on the uplands;
West is it, or East, O Love that you would be?

West now, or East? For, underneath the moonrise,
Also it is fair; and where the reeds are tall,
And the only little noise is the sound of quiet waters,
Heavy, like the rain, we shall hear the duck-oats fall.

And perhaps we shall see, rising slowly from the driftwood,
A lone crane go over to its inland nest:
Or a dark line of ducks will come in across the islands
And sail overhead to the marshes of the west.

Now a little wind rises up for our returning;
Silver grows the East as the West grows grey;
Shadows on the waters, shaded are the meadows,
The firs on the hillside — naught so dark as they.

Yet we have known the light!— Was ever such an August?
Your hand leaves mine; and the new stars gleam
As we separately go to our dreams of opened heaven,
— The golden dawn shall tell you that you did not dream.

~~
Francis Sherman (1871-1926)
From A Canadian Calendar: XII lyrics, 1900

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

Francis Sherman biography 

Canoeing on the Upper Tomoka River, Florida, 1905. Wikimedia Commons.

August, 1918 / Maurice Baring

August, 1918

(In a French Village.)

I hear the tinkling of the cattle bell,
    In the broad stillness of the afternoon;
    High in the cloudless haze the harvest moon
Is pallid as the phantom of a shell.
A girl is drawing water from a well,
    I hear the clatter of her wooden shoon;
    Two mothers to their sleeping babies croon,
And the hot village feels the drowsy spell.

Sleep, child, the Angel of Death his wings has spread;
    His engines scour the land, the sea, the sky;
    And all the weapons of Hell’s armoury
Are ready for the blood that is their bread;
    And many a thousand men to-night must die,
So many that they will not count the Dead.

 ~~
Maurice Baring (1874-1945)
from Poems, 1914-1919, 1920

Maurice Baring biography 

Léon Germain Pelouse (1838-1891), French riverside village at dusk, 1888.

Wikimedia Commons.

As August Comes / Clinton Scollard

As August Comes

In dull monotony of heat
    The hazy hills and lowlands lie,
And billow till they blend and meet
    With lurid amplitudes of sky.

The locust's shrilly fife-note cleaves
    The fervid air, a knife of sound,
As August comes with poppy leaves
    Around his swarthy temples bound.

~~
Clinton Scollard (1860-1932)
from  Old and New World Lyrics, 1888 

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

Clinton Scollard biography

Charles J. Sharp, Garden locust (Acanthacris ruficornis). CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

August's featured poem

The Penny Blog's featured poem for August 2025:

A Song to Mithras, by Rudyard Kipling

[...]

Mithras, God of the Noontide, the heather swims in the heat.

Our helmets scorch our foreheads, our sandals burn our feet.

[...]

(music by Griffin Distribution)

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-song-to-mithras.html

Penny's Top 20 / July 2025

    

Penny's Top 20

The most-visited poems on  The Penny Blog in July 2025:

  1.   Summer 1969, Michael G. Munoz

  2.  Large Red Man Reading, Wallace Stevens

  3.  Morning of My Life, Will Dockery

  4.  The Mounting Summer, Brilliant and Ominous, Delmore Schwartz

  5.  The Moon and Stars are Making Love, George J. Dance

  6.  Esthetique du Mal, Wallace Stevens

  7.  Even in the bluest noonday of July, Robert Louis Stevenson

  8.  July, William Morris

  9.  I am a Canadian, John Diefenbaker

10.  Gathered Roses, F.W. Bourdillon

11.   Summer Storm, Duncan Campbell Scott

12.  July, Folgore de San Geminiano

13.  A July Noon, Helen Gray Cone

14.  June, Folgore de San Geminiano

15.  The Bright Extensive Will, AE Reiff

16.  Ode to Sport, Pierre de Coubertin

17.  At Day-close in November, Thomas Hardy

18.  Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion, Wallace Stevens

19.  When Mary the Mother Kissed the Child, Charles G.D. Roberts

20. The Gravedigger, Bliss Carman

Source: Blogger, "Stats"