Autumn Day
Going out, those bold days,
O what a gallery-roar of trees and gale-wash
Of leaves abashed me, what a shudder and shore
Of bladdery shadows dashed on windows ablaze,
What hedge-shingle seething, what vast lime-splashes
Of light clouting the land. Never had I seen
Such a running over of clover, such tissue sheets
Of cloud poled asunder by sun, such plunges
And thunder-load of fun. Trees, grasses, wings - all
On a hone of wind sluiced and sleeked one way,
Smooth and close as the pile of a pony's coat,
But, in a moment, smoke-slewed, glared, squinted back
And up like sticking bones shockingly unkinned.
How my heart, like all these, was silk and thistle
By turns, how it fitted and followed the stiff lifts
And easy falls of them, or, like that bird above me,
No longer crushing against cushions of air,
Hung in happy apathy, waiting for wind-rifts:
Who could not dance on, and be dandled by, such a day
Of loud expansion? when every flash and shout
Took the hook of the mind and reeled out the eye's line
Into whips and whirl-spools of light, when every ash-shoot shone
Like a weal and was gone in the gloom of the wind's lash.
Who could not feel it? the uplift and total subtraction
Of breath as, now bellying, now in abeyance,
The gust poured up from the camp's throat below, bringing
Garbled reports of guns and bugle-notes,
But, gullible, then drank them back again.
And I, dryly shuffling through the scurf of leaves
Fleeing like scuffled toast, was host to all these things;
In me were the spoon-swoops of wind, in me too
The rooks dying and settling like tea-leaves over the trees;
And, rumbling on rims of rhyme, mine were the haycarts home-creeping
Leaving the rough hedge-cheeks long-strawed and streaked with their weeping.
W.R. Rodgers
"How my heart, like all these, was silk and thistle by turns.." I love that line. And all the hyphenated words. Gallery-roar, gale-wash,hedge-shingle, lime-splashes, thunder-load, smoke-slewed, wind-rifts, whirl-spools, ash-shoots, bugle-notes,spoon-swoops, tea-leaves, home-creeping, hedge-cheeks, long-strawed. So inventive and life-like - just like the wind tossing words together. The whole poem is full of onomatopoeic words - shuffling, scurf, scuffled, etc. Giving an auditory sense of the wind gusting and enlivening everything. A wonderful poem for a stormy Autumn day.
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