To Autumn

I feel thee as one feels a flower’s, A dead flower’s fragrance in a room,-- A dim, gray grief that haunts the hours With sad perfume.

Thou charm’st me as a ghostly lily Might charm a garden’s withered space, With the pale pathos and the chilly Hush of thy face.

I hearken in thy fogs; I hearken When, like the phantom of dead Night, With immaterial limbs they darken The day with white.

With wrecks of rain and mad winds, heaping Red ruins of riven rose and leaf, Make sad my heart, O Autumn! sweeping The world with grief.