Poems

Chapter 67: OLD TIME MELODY

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About This Book

A varied collection of lyric and narrative verse that moves between short songs, sonnets, rondels, and longer meditative pieces. Many poems use pastoral and seasonal imagery to celebrate fields, harvest, and the sensory life of the natural world while also acknowledging the hardships and dignity of rural labor. Recurring themes include love, absence, memory, and spiritual longing, treated with formal variety and musical language. The tone alternates between celebratory, elegiac, and reflective, blending vivid description with moral and emotional observation.

OLD TIME MELODY

I’m pining away for the way I’d go,

I’m pining away for the things I’ve seen,

For the joy of the fall of the first white snow,

And the sweep of the forest green.

But it’s not for the home-land, broad and fair;

The house on the hill, or the old ways spread;—

For why should I wander here or there,

Since you went down to the dead?

I’m pining away for the love you gave,

For the world that you made, when your life lay here.

And the path to the country beyond the grave

Is the way that I pine for, dear!