Verses and Sonnets

Chapter 39: SEPTEMBER.

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About This Book

This collection assembles sonnets, short lyrics, grotesques and epigrams that shift between playful satire and serious meditation. Poems evoke nocturnal reverie, pastoral songs, seasonal sonnets for each month, and compact narrative sketches, while recurring themes include youth and ageing, love and honour, music and faith, mortality and urban poverty. Formal variety—from polished sonnet sequences to biting epigrams—allows intimate love poems to sit beside comic portraits and moral reflections, producing a compact, varied lyrical volume that alternates tenderness, irony, and moral urgency across domestic, religious, and public scenes.

SEPTEMBER.

I, from a window where the Meuse is wide,

Looked eastward out to the September night;

The men that in the hopeless battle died

Rose, and deployed, and stationed for the fight;

A brumal army, vague and ordered large

For mile on mile by some pale general;

I saw them lean by companies to the charge,

But no man living heard the bugle-call.

And fading still, and pointing to their scars,

They fled in lessening cloud, where gray and high

Dawn lay along the heaven in misty bars;

But watching from that eastern casement, I

Saw the Republic splendid in the sky,

And round her terrible head the morning stars.