Poem: Autumn flowers

American Transcendentalist poet Jones Very aptly memorializes life's beauty for as long as our personal pilgrimage tends.



Autumn flowers


Still blooming on, when Summer-flowers all fade,
     The golden rods and asters fill the glade;
The tokens they of an Exhaustless Love,
     That ever to the end doth constant prove.

To one fair tribe another still succeeds,
     As still the heart new forms of beauty needs;
Till these, bright children of the waning year!
     Its latest born have come our souls to cheer.

They glance upon us from their fringed eyes,
     And to their look our own in love replies;
Within our hearts we find for them a place,
     As for the flowers, which early Spring-time grace.

Despond not traveller! on life's lengthened way,
      When all thy early friends have passed away;
Say not, "No more the beautiful doth live,
     And to the earth a bloom and fragrance give."

To every season has our Father given
     Some tokens of his love to us from heaven;
Nor leaves us here, uncheered, to walk alone,
     When all we loved and prized, in youth, has gone.

Let but thy heart go forth to all around,
      Still by thy side the beautiful is found;
Along thy path the Autumn flowers shall smile,
     And to its close life's pilgrimage beguile.

Poem: Pied Beauty

     What a glorious depiction of nature in its endless variety is this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, 19th century Wales.




Pied Beauty


Glory be to God for dappled things --
     For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow,
          For rose-moles all in supple upon trout that swim,
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finche's wings;
     Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;
          And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
     Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
          With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                         Praise him.