OUR INDIAN SUMMER
by: Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1809-1894)
- OU'LL believe
me, dear boys, 't is a pleasure to rise,
- With a welcome like this in your darling old eyes;
- To meet the same smiles and to hear the same tone
- Which have greeted me oft in the years that have flown.
-
- Were I gray as the grayest old rat in the wall,
- My locks would turn brown at the sight of you all;
- If my heart were as dry as the shell on the sand,
- It would fill like the goblet I hold in my hand.
-
- There are noontides of autumn when summer returns.
- Though the leaves are all garnered and sealed in their urns,
- And the bird on his perch, that was silent so long,
- Believes the sweet sunshine and breaks into song.
-
- We have caged the young birds of our beautiful June;
- Their plumes are still bright and their voices in tune;
- One moment of sunshine from faces like these
- And they sing as they sung in the green-growing trees.
-
- The voices of morning! how sweet is their thrill
- When the shadows have turned, and the evening grows still!
- The text of our lives may get wiser with age,
- But the print was so fair on its twentieth page!
-
- Look off from your goblet and up from your plate,
- Come, take the last journal, and glance at its date:
- Then think what we fellows should say and should do,
- If the 6 were a 9 and the 5 were a 2.
-
- Ah, no! for the shapes that would meet with us here,
- From the far land of shadows, are ever too dear!
- Though youth flung around us its pride and its charms,
- We should see but the comrades we clasped in our arms.
-
- A health to our future -- a sigh for our past,
- We love, we remember, we hope to the last;
- And for all the base lies that the almanacs hold,
- While we've youth in our hearts we can never grow old!
"Our Indian Summer" is
reprinted from The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Oliver Wendell Holmes. New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
1892. |
MORE POEMS BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES |
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