When a Tree Turns Yellow Early
ALL summer the green that I let go but will not let me go
Stirs at the curtain of my window, and the wind need not ever blow.
The morning turns to noonday fire, to the devil’s fork in the cloud,
To the spoken rain come bursting sweet, and the answering thunder loud;
And then the circling summer, beautiful in the green frame of the trees,
Murmurs at my window, at my door, as a flower-field of bees.
Should I think it as green forever, I have but to glance where the sun will glance
On a maple yellowing early by some long September chance.
There is no corner we come to turn that we lack this glimpse ahead:
The summer will go with the flight of birds we fear in the bird that’s fled.
I can pass my tree and come back home with its color of cooling sun,
And own to the green that I let go as yellower for this one;
And when it shakes to leafless end, I shall know its branch of old
With a reach well toward another spring in a year still glinting gold.
Stirs at the curtain of my window, and the wind need not ever blow.
The morning turns to noonday fire, to the devil’s fork in the cloud,
To the spoken rain come bursting sweet, and the answering thunder loud;
And then the circling summer, beautiful in the green frame of the trees,
Murmurs at my window, at my door, as a flower-field of bees.
Should I think it as green forever, I have but to glance where the sun will glance
On a maple yellowing early by some long September chance.
There is no corner we come to turn that we lack this glimpse ahead:
The summer will go with the flight of birds we fear in the bird that’s fled.
I can pass my tree and come back home with its color of cooling sun,
And own to the green that I let go as yellower for this one;
And when it shakes to leafless end, I shall know its branch of old
With a reach well toward another spring in a year still glinting gold.