November / Folgore da San Geminiano

from Of the Months

November

Let baths and wine-butts be November's due,
    With thirty mule-loads of broad gold-pieces;
    And canopy with silk the streets that freeze;
And keep your drink-horns steadily in view.
Let every trader have his gain of you:
    Clareta shall your lamps and torches send, —
    Caeta, citron-candies without end; 

And each shall drink, and help his neighbour to.
And let the cold be great, and the fire grand:
    And still for fowls, and pastries sweetly wrought,
        For hares and kids, for roast and boil'd, be sure
You always have your appetites at hand;
    And then let night howl and heaven fall, so nought
        Be miss'd that makes a man's bed-furniture.

~~
Folgore da San Geminiano (?1270-1332?)
translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
from The Early Italian Poets, 1861

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

[December]

Folgore da San Geminiano biography
Dante Gabriel Rossetti biography

from Livre d'heures de la reine Yolande, 15th century. Wikimedia Commons.

November / Maurice Thompson

November

A hint of slumber in the wind,
    A dreamful stir of blades and stalks,
As tenderly the twilight flows
    Down all my garden walks.

My robes of work are thrown aside,
    The odor of the grass is sweet;
The pleasure of a day well spent
    Bathes me from head to feet.

Calmly I wait the dreary change,—
    The season cutting sharp and sheer
Through the wan bowers of death that fringe
    The border of the year.

And while I muse, the fated earth
    Into a colder current dips,—
Feels winter's scourge with summer's kiss
    Still warm upon her lips.

~~ 

Maurice Thompson (1844-1901)
from Poems, 1892

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Maurice Thompson biography

Carlos Honda, Suzuka Flower Park, November 2013. CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

How happy I was if I could forget / Emily Dickinson

[898]

How happy I was if I could forget
To remember how sad I am
Would be an easy adversity
But the recollecting of Bloom

Keeps making November difficult
Till I who was almost bold
Lose my way like a little Child
And perish of the cold.

~~

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Emily Dickinson biography

"How happy I was if I could forget" read by Fabricio Guerrini.

A November Grave / James B. Kenyon

A November Grave

The grey clouds gather, fold on fold,
Above the blurred and dripping wold;
The light is growing pale and cold,
    And ghostly mists steal o'er the plain.

A robin in the elm is crying;
About the eaves the wind is sighing;
O dismal day! my heart is lying
    In yon fresh grave drenched with the rain.

~~
James B. Kenyon (1858-1924)
from At the Gate of Dreams, 1892

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

James B. Kenyon biography

Dave Hitchborne, Gravestone, St. Andrew's graveyard, Miningsby, 2007. 

CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

There's Nothing Like the Sun / Edward Thomas

There's Nothing Like the Sun

There's nothing like the sun as the year dies,
Kind as it can be, this world being made so,
To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies,
To all things that it touches except snow,
Whether on mountain side or street of town.
The south wall warms me: November has begun,
Yet never shone the sun as fair as now
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning's storm drop down
Because the starling shakes it, whistling what
Once swallows sang. But I have not forgot
That there is nothing, too, like March's sun,
Like April's, or July's, or June's, or May's,
Or January's, or February's, great days:
And August, September, October, and December
Have equal days, all different from November.
No day of any month but I have said –
Or, if I could live long enough, should say –
'There's nothing like the sun that shines today.'
There's nothing like the sun till we are dead.

~~
Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
from Poems, 1917

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Edward Thomas biography 

 "There's Nothing Like the Sun" read by John Snelling. Courtesy John Snelling.

November's featured poem

The Penny Blog's featured poem for November 2025:

I Speak Your Name, by Sophie Jewett

I speak your name in alien ways, while yet
November smiles from under lashes wet.
In the November light I see you stand
Who love the fading woods and withered land
[...]

(read by Miranda)

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2012/11/i-speak-your-name_24.html

November / Hartley Coleridge

Sonnet XVI. 

November

The mellow year is hasting to its close;
The little birds have almost sung their last,
Their small notes twitter in the dreary blast –
That shrill-piped harbinger of early snows:
The patient beauty of the scentless rose,
Oft with the morn's hoar crystal quaintly glass'd,
Hangs a pale mourner for the summer past,
And makes a little summer where it grows: 

 In the chill sunbeam of the faint brief day
The dusky waters shudder as they shine,
The russet leaves obstruct the straggling way
Of oozy brooks, which no deep banks define,
And the gaunt woods, in ragged, scant array,
Wrap their old limbs with sombre ivy twine.

~~

Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849)

from Poems, Songs, and Sonnets, 1833

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Hartley Coleridge biography

"November" read by Thomas D.

In November / Bliss Carman

In November

(Huitain)

With apple-bloom and scented buds of May
    And sweet winds born, how should the summer know,
When sweeps of leafless hills are desolate grey,
    The soft ethereal beauty of the snow?
    But we came through the spring, and still, below
The passion for all sensuous loveliness,
    Remember a white eternity aglow
With silent dawn, still-aired and passionless.

~~
Bliss Carman (1861-1929)
from Through the Year with the Poets: November, 1886

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

Bliss Carman biography

Apollyon, Winter Stream in Marjaniemi, Helsinki, Finland, 2006. Wikimedia Commons.

Design for November / William Carlos Williams

Design for November

Joseph Vernet (1714-1789),

The Four Times of Day: Midday, 1757 

(detail). Wikimedia Commons.

Let confusion be the design
and all my thoughts go,
swallowed by desire: recess
from promises in
the November of your arms.
Release from the rose: broken
reeds, strawpale,
through which, from easy
branches that mock the blood
a few leaves fall. There
the mind is cradled,
stripped also and returned
to the ground, a trivial
and momentary clatter. Sleep
and be brought down and so
condone the world, eased of
the jagged sky and all
its petty imageries, flying
birds, its fogs and windy
phalanxes . . .

~~
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
from Collected Later Poems, 1944

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

William Carlos Williams biography

November in the City / Edith Wyatt

November in the City

    I

Tonight the rain blows down from misty places
Above the roof-tops where the pigeons fly:
And quick the steps; intent, the city's faces
That say that we must hurry — you and I.
Oh, why ? So much speeds through this twilight rain-time,
That's not worth keeping up with. By-and-by
We'll wonder why we always knew the traintime,
And yet knew not November — you and I.

    II

In quiet let us hark. Not till we listen
Shall any song arise for you and me;
Nor ever this broad-stippling music glisten
Twice-told at twilight down the city sea.
The fog-horns call. The lake-winds rush. Just lately
I watched the city lights bloom star on star
Along the streets : and terrace-spaced and stately
Touch moated height and coronet afar.
November's winds blow towards the garnered grain-land.
Blue-buoyed all the shepherd whistles bay:
And flocking down Chicago's dusk-barred main land
The steam and fog-fleeced mists run, buff and gray.
Silence and sound. Wide echoes. Rain-dropped spaces.
Deep-rumbling dray and dipping trolley car.
Steps multitudinous and countless faces.
Along the cloudy street, lit star on star.

    III

Oh, had you thought that only woods and oceans
Were meant to speak the truth to you and me —
That only tides' and stars' immortal motions
Said we are part of all eternity?
The rains that fall and fly in silver tangent,
The passing steps, the fogs that die and live,
These chords that pale and darken, hushed and plangent
Sing proud the praise of splendors fugitive.
For fleet-pulsed mists, and mortal steps and faces
More move me than the tides that know no years —
And music blown from rain-swept human places
More stirs me than the stars untouched with tears.
I think that such a night as this has never
Sung argent here before: and not again
With all these tall-roofed intervals that sever
These streets and corners, etched with lamp-lit rain
Tell just this cool-thrilled tale of Midland spaces
And lake-born mists, that black-lined building's prow
That cuts the steam, this dream in peopled places
That sings its deep-breathed beauty here and now.

    IV

November winds wing towards the garnered grain-land.
The city lights have risen. Proud and free,
Far music swinging down the dusk-barred main land
Cries we are part of all eternity.
Let tne remember, let me rise and sing it!
For others may the mountains be the sign,
Sun, stars, the wooded earth, the seas that ring it,
Of melody immortal. Here is mine.
This night when rain blows down through Midland spaces
And lake-born mists. A black-lined building's prow
That cuts the steam. A dream in peopled places
That sings its deep-breathed beauty here and now.

~~

Edith Wyatt (1873-1958)

from The Wind in the Corn, and other poems, 1917

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

Edith Wyatt biography

Britta Heise, Chicago Night River, November 2011. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

November / Edwin Arnold

from The Twelve Months

November

Come! in thy veil of ashen cloud
With mists around thee, like a shroud,
And wan face coloured with no light
Of sun or moon, by day or night;
I would not see thee glad and gay,
Dark month! that called my Love away!

I would not see thee otherwise,
Gray month! that hast the dying eyes;
Cold month! that com'st with icy hands
Chaining the waters and the lands!
So didst thou chill two hearts at play,
Dark month! that called my Love away!

And yet, I know, behind thy mists
The bright Sun shines, Love's star subsists!
If we could lift thy veil, may be,
Thy hidden face were good to see!
Come as thou wilt — I say not nay,
Dark month! that called my Love away!

~~

Edwin Arnold (1832-1904), 1884

from Poems: National and non-oriental, 1906

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Thanurietz, Rain and Misty Mountains, November 2017 (detail). 

CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

[December]

Edwin Arnold biography

The Death of the Flowers / William Cullen Bryant

The Death Of The Flowers

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread.
The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.

Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood
In brighter light, and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race, of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.

The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,
And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sun-flower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.

And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;
When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill,
The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.

And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,
The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side:
In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:
Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.

~~

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

from Poems, 1848

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

William Cullen Bryant biography

Librivox, "The Death of the Flowers." Courtesy Poems Cafe.

November / George J. Dance

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Rain, November 1889.
Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

November

        dying land
            crying sky
                cold, cold tears

~~
George J. Dance

from Logos, and 

other logoi, 2021

[December]

["November" by George J. Dance is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License.]

George J. Dance biography

The Thrush / Edward Thomas

The Thrush

When Winter's ahead,
What can you read in November
That you read in April
When Winter's dead?

I hear the thrush, and I see
Him alone at the end of the lane
Near the bare poplar's tip,
Singing continuously.

Is it more that you know
Than that, even as in April,
So in November,
Winter is gone that must go?

Or is all your lore
Not to call November November,
And April April,
And Winter Winter — no more?

But I know the months all,
And their sweet names, April,
May and June and October,
As you call and call

I must remember
What died into April
And consider what will be born
Of a fair November;

And April I love for what
It was born of, and November
For what it will die in,
What they are and what they are not,

While you love what is kind,
What you can sing in
And love and forget in
All that's ahead and behind.

~~
Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
from Poems, 1917

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Edward Thomas biography

"The Thrush" read by B W Thornton.

See also: "On a Thrush Singing in Autumn," by Lewis Morris

November's featured poem

The Penny Blog's featured poem for November 2024:

For the Fallen, by Laurence Binyon

[...]
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
[...]

(read by Laurence Fox)

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2011/11/for-fallen-lawrence-binyon.html

At Day-close in November / Thomas Hardy

At Day-close in November

The ten hours' light is abating,
    And a late bird flies across,
Where the pines, like waltzers waiting,
    Give their black heads a toss.

Beech leaves, that yellow the noon-time,
    Float past like specks in the eye;
I set every tree in my June time,
    And now they obscure the sky.

And the children who ramble through here
    Conceive that there never has been
A time when no tall trees grew here,
    That none will in time be seen.

~~

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

from Collected Poems, 1919

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

Thomas Hardy biography

"At Day-close in November" read by John Pryck.

Joy in Sorrow / James Alexander Tucker

Joy in Sorrow

The dull November days are here,
Days of wan skies and landscapes drear,
When through the forest far and near
Is heard the squirrel chattering clear,
        The partridge drumming low;
When all throughout the faded land,
Like alms from some swift, scornful hand
Toss'd to a wretched beggar band,
        The gold leaves downward blow.

Anon when moons are pale on high,
Encircled in a watery sky,
Is heard the loon's last lonely cry
From shores where silent shadows lie
        Dark-dyed in depths below;
And ever through the restless night,
Afar to left and far to right,
Like some unclean and cursed sprite,
        The owl flits to and fro.

But though the world is gray and lone,
The song-birds and the flowers flown;
Though on each writhing wind is blown
The dirge of summer overthrown,
        Man is not wholly bowed.
From some unguessed, unfathom'd spell,
He feels a joy he cannot tell;
Oh, in the wild night it is well
        One star is still allowed!

Thus, when our heads are bended low,
And Death, the tyrant, smites with woe,
Our souls may catch some mystic glow
To light the dismal way; for though
        We never quite may tell
Whence comes it to the bruised heart,
Its balm and healing to impart,
Yet always with the pang, the smart,
        There cometh peace as well.

~~

James Alexander Tucker (1872-1903)

from Poems, 1904

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

James Alexander Tucker biography

Simon Harrod, Landscape in grey and brown, 2012. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

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.

The Song-sparrow in November / Arthur Stringer

The Song-sparrow in November

Alone, forlorn, blown down autummal hills,
Floats sweetly solemn, fond and low,
One mournful-noted song that fills
The twilight, lonely grown with snow.

O shower of sound that more than Music seems,
O song that some vague sadness of farewell
Leaves crowned and warm with tears! — must all our dreams
Of deepest Beauty thus with Sorrow dwell?

~~
Arthur Stringer (1874-1950)
from The Woman in the rain, and other poems, 1907

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

Arthur Stringer biography

Rhododendrites, White-Throated Sparrow in Prospect Part, November 2020.

CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

November / H. Cordelia Ray

from The Procession of the Seasons

November

The leaves are sere,
The woods are drear,
The breeze that erst so merrily did play,
Naught giveth but a melancholy lay;
Yet life's great lessons do not fail
E'en in November's gale.
 
~~
H. Cordelia Ray (1852-1916)
from Poems, 1910

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

[December]

H. Cordelia Ray biography

Doug Lee, Late Autumn in the West Woods, 2011. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.