Poetry Friday--"November"

Here's a little seasonal poem by William Dean Howells:

November
Impression

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.

Howells was born in Ohio in 1837, but as a young man he traveled to Massachusetts where he made the acquaintance of many New England writers such as Emerson and Thoreau. He was writer of novels, poetry, literary criticism, essays, and was an editor of The Atlantic Monthly.

Howells had a peripatetic life--traveling from place to place. He lived in England, Italy, New York, Maine, and Massachusetts. His final resting place is in Cambridge, MA, which I guess that makes him a New Englander by default, and, explains the melancholy tone of "November." New Englanders have a penchant for looking back to glad times.

Well, cheer up and head over to the Poetry Friday Round-Up, which is being hosted by Tabatha Yeatts.

--Diane

Photo © Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.