Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 1900.

By EmilyDickinson

537 Nature

A LADY red upon the hill

Her annual secret keeps;

A lady white within the field

In placid lily sleeps!

The tidy breezes with their brooms

Sweep vail, and hill, and tree!

Prithee, my pretty housewives!

Who may expected be?

The neighbors do not yet suspect!

The woods exchange a smile,—

Orchard, and buttercup, and bird,

In such a little while!

And yet how still the landscape stands,

How nonchalant the wood,

As if the resurrection

Were nothing very odd!

THE MORNS are meeker than they were,

The nuts are getting brown;

The berry’s cheek is plumper,

The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,

The field a scarlet gown.

Lest I should be old-fashioned,

I ’ll put a trinket on.

THE SKY is low, the clouds are mean,

A travelling flake of snow

Across a barn or through a rut

Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day

How someone treated him:

Nature, like us, is sometimes caught

Without her diadem.

GOD made a little gentian;

It tried to be a rose

And failed, and all the summer laughed;

But just before the snows

There came a purple creature

That ravished all the hill;

And summer hid her forehead,

And mockery was still.

The frosts were her condition;

The Tyrian would not come

Until the North evoked it:—

“Creator! shall I bloom?”