Saturday Poetry Corner: Sonnet 161

 

 

 

  

The Cape In Autumn
Maine's Portland Head Lighthouse
Portland, Maine
Photograph by Gregory Ballos
Image courtesy/Fine Art America

 

 

Tranquility at length when autumn comes,

Will lie upon the spirit like that haze

Touching far islands on fine autumn days

With tenderest blue, like bloom on purple plums;

Harvest will ring, but not as summer hums,

With noisy enterprise-to broaden, raise,

Proceed, proclaim, establish: autumn stays

The marching year one moment; still the drums.

Then sits the insistent cricket in the grass;

But on the gravel crawls the chilly bee; 

And all is over that could come to pass

Last year; excepting this: the mind is free

One moment, to compute, refute, amass,

Catalogue, question, contemplate, and see. 

"Sonnet 161"
(1946)
Edna St. Vincent Millay 
(1892-1950)
American lyrical poet and playwright