Sweet September Days / George W. Doneghy

Sweet September Days

    I

There's a something in the atmosphere, in sweet September days,
That mantles all the landscape with its languid, dreamy haze;
And you see the leaves a-dropping, in a lazy kind of way,
Where the maple trees are standing in their Summer-time array.

    II

There's a yellowish tinge a-creeping over Nature's emerald sheen,
And the cattle stand, half-sleeping, in the middle of the stream
Where the glassy pool is shaded by the overhanging limb,
And the pebbly bottom's glinting where the silvery minnows swim.

    III

The tasseled corn is nodding, and the crow on drowsy wing
Is sailing o'er the orchard where the ripening apples swing,
And the fleecy clouds are floating in the azure of the sky,
And the gentle breeze is sighing as it's idly wafted by.

    IV

The cantaloupes are ripening in their yellow golden rinds;
And the melons, round and juicy, are a-clinging to the vines;
And the merry, laughing children, in their happy hour of play,
Are a-romping in the meadow and a-sliding down the hay.

    V

The busy bees are buzzing where the grapes with purple blush,
And the hanging bunches tempting with their weight the arbor crush,
And the blue jays are a-wrangling in the wood across the road,
Where the hickory boughs are bending 'neath an extra heavy load.

    VI

Let your poets keep a-singing about the Springtime gay,
And the blossoms and the flowers in the merry month of May —
But the early Autumn splendor, with its sweet September days,
Eclipses boasted Springtime in a thousand kind of ways!

~~
George W. Doneghy (1848-1917)
from The Old Hanging Fork, and other poems, 1897

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

George W. Doneghy biography

John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902), September Sunshine, ca. 1892. 

Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.