The Waning Year

A Sense of something that is sad and strange;     Of something that is felt as death is felt,     As shadows, phantoms, in a haunted grange,     Around me seems to melt.     It rises, so it seems, from the decay     Of the dim woods; from withered leaves and weeds,     And dead flowers hanging by the woodland way     Sad, hoary heads of seeds.     And from the cricket's song, so feeble now     'T is like a sound heard in the heart, a call     Dreamier than dreams; and from the shaken bough,     From which the acorns fall.     From scents and sounds it rises, sadly slow,     This presence, that hath neither face nor form;     That in the woods sits like demented woe,     Whispering of wreck and storm.     A presence wrought of melancholy grief,     And dreams that die; that, in the streaming night,     I shall behold, like some fantastic leaf,     Beat at my window's light.     That I shall hear, outside my storm-lashed door,     Moan like the wind in some rain-tortured tree;     Or 'round my roof and down my chimney roar     All the wild night to me.