Classic Poem

The sultry day is ending,
The clouds are fading away,
Orange with purple is blending
And purple is turning to gray;
The gray grows darker and denser
Till it and the earth are one;
A star swings out like a censer,
And the brief warm night is begun.

The brown moth floats and poises
Like a leaf in the windless air;
Aroused by insect noises
The gray toad leaves his lair;
Sounding the dusk depth quickly
The bull-bats fall and rise,
And out of the grasses thickly
Swarm glistering fire-flies.

Now darkness heavy, oppressive
And silent completes the gloom.
The breathless night is excessive
With fragrance of perfume,
For the land is enmeshed and ablaze
With vines that blossom and trail,
Embanking the traveled ways
And festooning the fences of rail.

Afar in the southern sky
Heat-lightning flares and glows,
Vividly tinting the clouds that lie
At rest with a shimmer of rose —
Tremulous, flitting, uncertain,
As a mystical light might shine
From under an ebon curtain
Before a terrible shrine.

And the slumbrous night grows late.
The midnight hush is deep.
Under the pines I wait
For the moon; and the pine trees weep
Great drops of dew, that fall
Like footsteps here and there,
And they sadly whisper and call
To each other high in the air.

They rustle and whisper like ghosts,
They sigh like souls in pain,
Like the movement of stealthy hosts
They surge, and are silent again.
The midnight hush is deep,
But the pines — the spirits distrest —
They move in somnambulant sleep —
They whisper and are not at rest.

Lo! a light in the east opalescent
Softly suffuses the sky
Where flocculent clouds are quiescent,
Where like froth of the ocean they lie —
Like foam on the beach they crimple
Where the wave has spent its swirl —
Like the curve of a shell they dimple
Into iridescent pearl.

And the light grows brighter and higher
Till far through the trees I see
The rim of a globe of fire
That rolls through the darkness to me,
And the aisles of the forest gleam
With a splendor unearthly, that shines
Like the light of a lurid dream
Through the colonnaded pines.