Poem: “The Harvest Moon,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is the Harvest Moon! 

On gilded vanes 

And roofs of villages, 

on woodland crests 

And their aerial neighborhoods of nests 

Deserted, on the curtained window-panes 

Of room where children sleep, on country lanes 

And harvest fields, its mystic splendor rests! 

Gone are the birds that were our summer guests, 

With the last sheaves return the laboring wains! 

All thing are symbols: the external shows 

Of Nature have their image in the mind, 

As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves; 

The song-birds leave us at the summer’s close, 

Only the empty nests are left behind, 

And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.