Seasonal

Now falls as always on the fields of trees
Indifferent autumn— moving to despair
Only man, who in what terror sees
Eventual April, with himself not there:

He hears in hard wind the sentencing word;
In rain he feels a continuous mode of grief,
And his heart drops like a stone sinking like a bird
Settling like a fallen leaf.

Everywhere windy ruin daubs the sky
With wet, unvarying gray, or white or frost.
Man’s resignation says this will go by,
But he himself is lost;

And standing under the untransmuted oak
He gazes long at his strange, perishing breath —
Puts on nostalgia like a dragging cloak,
And thinks cold thoughts of death.