An October Afternoon / William Wilfred Campbell

An October Afternoon

The grey and silent sky above
    A rain-mist spins and weaves.
And underneath the sombre earth
    Is carpeted with leaves.

With solemn droppings, hour by hour,
    Great, still and ghostly arms
Point in a huddled, grotesque mood
    Across the eerie farms.

Between the sombre hill-side lands,
    Far out with vapours furled,
The mighty river like a dream,
    Goes winding down the world.

Above his silent, floating floor,
    That seems hke mist to rise,
Beyond the farmlands, out to north,
    The blue hills meet the skies.

Here all along the bare hill-side
    I hear, in dreams, the call
Of some lone jay, whose harmting note
    Bemoans him of the fall.

And in the browning woods above
    With slumberous, hollow sound,
At intervals the beechen nuts
    Go dropping to the ground.

Upon this silent afternoon
    The season seems to stand
Like one who muses with her book
    Of magic in her hand;

Nor dreams December’s maddened mood,
    Nor winter’s icy dart;
But simply drinks her elfin spell
    Back into her own heart.

~~
William Wilfred Campbell (1860-1918)
from Poetical Works, 1922

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

William Wilfred Campbell biography

 

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1889),  An October Afternoon, 1871 (detail). 

Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.