November

A weft of leafless spray

Woven fine against the gray

Of the autumnal day,

And blurred along those ghostly garden tops

Clusters of berries crimson as the drops

That my heart bleeds when I remember

How often, in how many a far November,

Of childhood and my children's childhood I was glad,

With the wild rapture of the Fall,

Of all the beauty, and of all

The ruin, now so intolerably sad.

- William Dean Howells