November / Wilson MacDonald

November

Some nomad yearning burns within my singing
    For that bleak beauty scorned of lute and lyre,
That loveliness of gray whereon are winging

  The last wild lyrists of the marsh and mire.   

    And, lest that migrant choir 

Should wing away all music from the land,
    By one forgotten lake I chant this song;
And that cold passion of her choric sand
    Shall to my muse belong.

This lake, unnamed in June, is still more nameless
  Amid this ruined grandeur of the year,
These roofless, pillared temples where the tameless
  Young Winter soon will chase her frosty spear;
  And where even now I hear
The prelude of her long and ghostly wail
  In boughs that creak and shallows that congeal,
And, like a child who hears some ghostly tale,
  A strange delight I feel.

I saw the year pass by me like a dancer:
  The imp of April and the child of May,
The modest maid of June with her soft answer
  To every wooing wind that blew her way.
  And now, this autumn day,
When the high rouge of leaf no more conceals
  And there is none to pipe a dancing theme,
A woman old, with heavy toes and heels,
  Plods by me in a dream.

Let others pour their opulence of roses
  To please their high-born ladies of the tower;
Rather would I the thin, wan hand that closes
  In grateful love about my simple flower.
  While comrade singers shower
With wonderment of word and garish phrase
  The luscious year, that moves from plough to plough,
I rest content to twine mine austere bays
  About November’s brow.

Here, in this cheerless womb, is born the glory
  Of June’s white-woven whorl of scented hours.
And here, within this mist supine and hoary,   

    Is dreamed the foot of April’s dancing showers.
  Here, where the black leaf cowers
Against the dusky bosom of the earth,
  Is drawn the milk that feeds the dawning year;
And Flora plans, herself, the rhythmic birth
  Of spring’s new chorus here.

Above my nameless lake the broken fingers
  Of those once-hardy reeds are jewelled with ice;
The mallard duck, despite this warning, lingers
  Until the gripping air is like a vice.
  The year hath tossed her dice
And lost the Indian summer, and the loon
  Chills, with her wintry laughter, the bleak skies —
And, where a meagre sun is doled at noon,
  A wounded pheasant dies.

 
And, lest these hueless days should pass despairing,
  The rose hath garbed her seeds in orbs of red —
The last warm touch of pure, autumnal daring
  In all this frosty garden of the dead.
  The quail, to hardship bred,
Frames her soft eyes with tangled brush and brier,
  And woos us with the contrast; and the hare,
Urged by the weasel’s probing eyes of fire,
  Leaps from her peaceful lair.

This is the hour when the bold sun is sleeping
  On his last couch — and here his lady comes,
Cold as a cloud that will not melt to weeping,
  And breaks the flutes and muffles all the drums,
  And the last warmth benumbs.
I know the road she walks to greet her lord
  By the strange rustle of her silken dress;
Or do I hear the oak-tree’s phantom horde
  Of dead leaves in distress?

O troubadours of spring! O bards of gladness,
  Who in the scented gardens love to throng!
So loath are ye to sing the hour of sadness
  When all the world is hungry for a song,
  And nights are strange and long,
That I, in this pale hour, have called mine art
  To hymn that beauty, scorned of pen and tongue;
For God Himself hath set my song apart
  To praise His worlds unsung.

~~
Wilson MacDonald (1880-1967)
from Out of the Wilderness, 1926

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

Wilson MacDonald biography

Traveling Otter, Dusk at Pontoon Lake, Yellowknife, Canada, November 2010.

CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.