Poetry Archives

Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not:
 I am no summer friend, but wintry cold,
 A silly sheep benighted from the fold,
A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot.
Take counsel, sever from my lot your lot,
 Dwell in your pleasant places, hoard your gold;
 Lest you with me should shiver on the wold,
Athirst and hungering on a barren spot.
For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge,
 I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
 Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
 On sometime summer’s unreturning track.