Autumn Communion / Gladys Cromwell

Autumn Communion

This autumn afternoon
My fancy need invent
No untried sacrament.
Man can still commune
With Beauty as of old:
The tree, the wind’s lyre,
The whirling dust, the fire —
In these my faith is told.

Beauty warms us all;
When horizons crimson burn,
We hold heaven’s cup in turn.
The dry leaves gleaming fall,
Crumbs of mystical bread;
My dole of Beauty I break,
Love to my lips I take,
And fear is quieted.

The symbols of old are made new:
I watch the reeds and the rushes,
The spruce trees dip their brushes
In the mountain’s dusky blue;
The sky is deep like a pool;
A fragrance the wind brings over
Is warm like hidden clover,
Though the wind itself is cool.

Across the air, between
The stems and the grey things,
Sunlight a trellis flings.
In quietude I lean:
I hear the lifting zephyr
Soft and shy and wild;
And I feel earth gentle and mild
Like the eyes of a velvet heifer.

Love scatters and love disperses.
Lightly the orchards dance
In a lovely radiance.
Down sloping terraces
They toss their mellow fruits.
The rhythmic wind is sowing,
Softly the floods are flowing
Between the twisted roots.

What Beauty need I own
When the symbol satisfies?
I follow services
Of tree and cloud and stone.
Color floods the world;
I am swayed by sympathy;
Love is a litany
In leaf and cloud unfurled.

~~
Gladys Cromwell (1885-1919)
from Poems, 1919

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

Gladys Cromwell biography

Winter Poetry / Gladys Cromwell

Winter Poetry

Lovers think that they alone possess
A sense of beauty. They ascribe all graces
To their love; seeing earth's wintry places
Warmed and enchanted, they suppose and guess
Their own illusion makes the loveliness.
They dream their flame illumines the dim spaces
Of the sky; they think the earth embraces
No charm but that their pleasure can express.
Yet we, who shun romance, find beauty near;
A stillness in the air when summer's gone;
On the fine winter stem hang subtle fruits;
We like to see the slender willow spear;
We like red weeds and branches blackly drawn,
And the white snow embroidered with brown roots.

~~
Gladys Cromwell (1885-1919)
from Poems, 1919

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

Gladys Cromwell biography

Autumn / Gladys Cromwell

Autumn

Capricious little poem and sapling rhyme
Grew on the golden hillside of my youth.
The stanzas were as crooked and uncouth
As early things are wont to be. For time
Was pressing and mid-summer's glowing prime
Was ever imminent. Mysterious truth
Was the warm soil thought sprouted from.
     Forsooth
My songs were stem and filament to climb.
But now, the memory of bud and fruit
And flower is weariness. This present week
In mid-September, wayward wild pursuit
Is over; youth fulfilled. How shall they seek
Beyond, unless from sunbeams in the skies
These listless leaves take warmer harmonies?

~~
Gladys Cromwell (1885-1919)
from The Gates of Utterance, and other poems, 1915

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

Gladys Cromwell biography