Summer ends now

[wolfinthewood]

Song

The feathers of the willow
Are half of them grown yellow
Above the swelling stream;
And ragged are the bushes,
And rusty now the rushes,
And wild the clouded gleam.

The thistle now is older,
His stalk begins to moulder,
His head is white as snow;
The branches all are barer,
The linnet’s song is rarer,
The robin pipeth now.

Richard Watson Dixon (1833–1900)

‘I do not think anywhere two stanzas so crowded with the pathos of nature and landscape could be found (except perhaps there are some in Wordsworth) as the little song of the Feathers of the Willow: a tune to it came to me quite naturally.’ – Gerard Manley Hopkins in a letter to Richard Watson Dixon, June 4 1878


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