Sunset In Autumn

Blood-Coloured oaks, that stand against a sky of gold and brass;     Gaunt slopes, on which the bleak leaves glow of brier and sassafras,     And broom-sedge strips of smoky-pink and pearl gray clumps of grass     In which, beneath the ragged sky, the rain pools gleam like glass.     From West to East, from wood to wood, along the forest-side,     The winds, the sowers of the Lord, with thunderous footsteps stride;     Their stormy hands rain acorns down; and mad leaves, wildly dyed,     Like tatters of their rushing cloaks, stream round them far and wide.     The frail leaf-cricket in the weeds rings a faint fairy bell;     And like a torch of phantom ray the milkweed's windy shell     Glimmers; while, wrapped in withered dreams, the wet autumnal smell     Of loam and leaf, like some sad ghost, steals over field and dell.     The oaks, against a copper sky o'er which, like some black lake     Of Dis, bronze clouds, like surges fringed with sullen fire, break     Loom sombre as Doom's citadel above the vales that make     A pathway to a land of mist the moon's pale feet shall take.     Now, dyed with burning carbuncle, a limbo-litten pane,     Within its walls of storm, the West opens to hill and plain,     On which the wild-geese ink themselves, a far triangled train,     And then the shuttering clouds close down and night is here again.