MIDSUMMER

The mellow smell of hollyhocks

And marigolds and pinks and phlox

Blends with the homely garden scents

Of onions, silvering into rods;

Of peppers, scarlet with their pods;

And ( rose of all the esculents )

Of broad plebeian cabbages,

Breathing content and corpulent ease.

The buzz of wasp and fly makes hot

The spaces of the garden-plot;

And from the orchard,— where the fruit

Ripens and rounds, or, loosed with heat,

Rolls, hornet-clung, before the feet,—

One hears the veery's golden flute,

That mixes with the sleepy hum

Of bees that drowsily go and come.

The podded musk of gourd and vine

Embower a gate of roughest pine,

That leads into a wood where day

Sits, leaning o'er a forest pool,

Watching the lilies opening cool,

And dragonflies at airy play,

While, dim and near, the quietness

Rustles and stirs her leafy dress.

Far-off a cowbell clangs awake

The noon who slumbers in the brake:

And now a pewee, plaintively,

Whistles the day to sleep again:

A rain-crow croaks a rune for rain,

And from the ripest apple tree

A great gold apple thuds, where, slow,

The red cock curves his neck to crow.

Hens cluck their broods from place to place,

While clinking home, with chain and trace,

The cart-horse plods along the road

Where afternoon sits with his dreams:

Hot fragrance of hay-making streams

Above him, and a high-heaped load

Goes creaking by and with it, sweet,

The aromatic soul of heat.

“Coo-ee! coo-ee!” the evenfall

Cries, and the hills repeat the call:

“Coo-ee! coo-ee!” and by the log

Labor unharnesses his plow,

While to the barn comes cow on cow:

“Coo-ee! coo-ee!” — and, with his dog,

Barefooted boyhood down the lane

“Coo-ees” the cattle home again.