The sobered robin, hunger-silent now,
      Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer;
        The chipmunk, on the shingly shagbark’s bough,
      Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear,
        Then drops his nut, and, cheeping, with a bound 40
        Whisks to his winding fastness underground;
    The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere.

        O’er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows
      Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman’s call
        Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; 45
      The single crow a single caw lets fall;
        And all around me every bush and tree
        Says Autumn’s here, and Winter soon will be,
    Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all.

        The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, 50
      Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves,
        And hints at her foregone gentilities
      With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves;
        The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on,
        Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, 55
    As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves.

        He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt,
      Who, ’mid some council of the sad-garbed whites,
        Erect and stern, in his own memories lapt,
      With distant eye broods over other sights, 60
        Sees the hushed wood the city’s flare replace,
        The wounded turf heal o’er the railway’s trace,
    And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights.

        The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost,
      And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry, 65
        After the first betrayal of the frost,
      Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky: 
        The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold,
        To the faint Summer, beggared now and old,
    Pour back the sunshine hoarded ’neath her favoring eye. 70

        The ash her purple drops forgivingly
      And sadly, breaking not the general hush: 
        The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea,
      Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush;
        All round the wood’s edge creeps the skirting blaze 75
        Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days,
    Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush.

        O’er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone,
      Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine
        Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80
      Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine,
        The tangled blackberry, crossed and re-crossed, weaves
        A prickly network of ensanguined leaves;
    Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine.