A December Day / J.A. Kerr

A December Day

Low-drifting clouds o'erspread the sky;
    The day is dull, the landscape drear;
On earth's fair bosom snowflakes lie,
    While trees their snow-clad branches rear.

From lowering clouds the winter rain,
    Cheerless, descends no longer, now;
To patter loud on roof and pane,
    But falls the dancing flakes of snow.

The birds give forth no notes of cheer,
    For they have flown. The woods are still;
The fields are shorn, and brown, and sear;
    Ice-bound are river, brook and rill.

All nature seems grown gray with rime,
    And longs for rest — to die, to sleep;
Like man, woos sweet rest, courts decline,
    And feels the death-chill o'er her creep.

Her race seems short, and almost run:
    Her knell is tolled by pattering hail.
In clouds of crepe is clad the sun;
    The wind gives forth a moaning wall.

The earth seems wrapped in her last sleep —
    All nature robed in shrouds of snow.
The lowering clouds in pity weep,
    That she, like man, is thus laid low.

~~
J.A. Kerr
from Local and National Poets of America, 1890

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

J.A. Kerr biography

Luigi Loir (1845-1916), Avenue de Neuilly on a Winter Day, 1874. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons