
The Death of the Flowers
By William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)
THE MELANCHOLY days are come, the saddest of the year,
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the withered leaves lie dead:
The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay;        5
And from the wood-top calls the crow, through all the gloomy day.
Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood,
In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves: the gentle race of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours.        10
Calls not, from out the gloomy earth, the lovely ones again.
The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago;
But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,        15
Till fell the frost from the clear, cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone from upland, glade, and glen.
And now when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;        20
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill,—
And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,        25
The fair, meek blossom that grew up, and faded by my side:
In the cold moist earth we laid her when the forest cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief;
Yet not unmeet it was, that one, like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.        30
