Featured Poem: Autumn Idleness by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Today's Featured Poem is brought to you by Jamie Barton, our Business and Content Manager at The Reader. This poem paints a detailed picture of nature as autumn comes to an end and how this image is mirrored in humankind.

Autumn Idleness

This sunlight shames November where he grieves
In dead red leaves, and will not let him shun
The day, though bough with bough be over-run.
But with a blessing every glade receives
High salutation; while from hillock-eaves
The deer gaze calling, dappled white and dun,
As if, foresters of old, the sun
Had marked them with the shade of forest-leaves.

Here dawn to-day unveiled her magic glass;
Here noon now gives the thirst and takes the dew;
Till eve bring rest when other good things pass.
And here the lost hours the lost hours renew
While I lead my shadow o’er the grass,
Nor know, for longing, that which I should do.

By Dante Gabriel Rossetti from ‘A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year’, Jane McMorland Hunter (ed.)