In June / Albert E.S. Smythe

In June

Oh! Wearily and wearily the days
     Have worn themselves from winter into June,
For tardily and tediously delays
     The summer's perfect loveliness of noon.
The sun that soars in heat and sinks in haze,
     The flowers that wrap themselves in scent and swoon,
The wind that hardly goes and hardly stays,
     The lazy birds that chirp a slothful tune,
The quiet rippling water running by,
     The leaves that rustle loosely overhead,
All peacefully I ponder as I lie
     Long thinking in my shady grass-grown bed,
And musing on them for a pastime try
     To realize the winter world instead,
And this seems like a dream before we die,
     And that is like a dream of lying dead.

~~
Albert E.S. Smythe
from Poems Grave and Gay, 1891

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

Albert E.S. Smythe biography