The Harvest Moon / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Harvest Moon

It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
     And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
     And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
     And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
     Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
     Of Nature have their image in the mind,
     As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer’s close,
     Only the empty nests are left behind,
     And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.

~~
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
from Keramos, and other poems, 1878

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow biography