PREVISION

by: Ada Foster Murray (1857-1936)

      H, days of beauty standing veiled apart,
      With dreamy skies and tender, tremulous air,
      In this rich Indian summer of the heart
      Well may the earth her jewelled halo wear.
       
      The long brown fields -- no longer drear and dull --
      Burn with the glow of these deep-hearted hours,
      Until the dry weeds seem more beautiful,
      More spiritlike than even summer's flowers.
       
      But yesterday the world was stricken bare,
      Left old and dead in gray, enshrouding gloom;
      To-day what vivid wonder of the air
      Awakes the soul of vanished light and bloom?
       
      Sharp with the clean, fine ecstasy of death,
      A mightier wind shall strike the shrinking earth,
      An exhalation of creative breath
      Wake the white wonder of the winter's birth.
       
      In her wide Pantheon -- her temple place --
      Wrapped in strange beauty and new comforting,
      We shall not miss the Summer's full-blown grace,
      Nor hunger for the swift, exquisite Spring.

"Prevision" is reprinted from The Little Book of American Poets: 1787-1900. Ed. Jessie B. Rittenhouse. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1915.

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