Wylie

This is a great poem by American and famous beauty Elinor Wylie [1885-1928]--the early lines remind you of Keats, but then end is very American, Wordsworth/Frost style. It's spine chilling.

Wild Peaches

1

When the world turns completely upside down 

You say we'll emigrate to the Eastern Shore 

Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore; 

We'll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, 

You'll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown 

Homespun, dyed butternut's dark gold colour. 

Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor, 

We'll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

The winter will be short, the summer long, 

The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, 

Tasting of cider and of scuppernong; 

All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all. 

The squirrels in their silver fur will fall 

Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.

2

The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass 

Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold. 

The misted early mornings will be cold; 

The little puddles will be roofed with glass. 

The sun, which burns from copper into brass, 

Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold 

Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold 

Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass.

Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover; 

A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year; 

The spring begins before the winter's over. 

By February you may find the skins 

Of garter snakes and water moccasins 

Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear.

3

When April pours the colours of a shell 

Upon the hills, when every little creek 

Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake 

In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell, 

When strawberries go begging, and the sleek 

Blue plums lie open to the blackbird's beak, 

We shall live well -- we shall live very well.

The months between the cherries and the peaches 

Are brimming cornucopias which spill 

Fruits red and purple, sombre-bloomed and black; 

Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches 

We'll trample bright persimmons, while you kill 

Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback.

4

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones 

There's something in this richness that I hate. 

I love the look, austere, immaculate, 

Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. 

There's something in my very blood that owns 

Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, 

A thread of water, churned to milky spate 

Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.

I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray, 

Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves; 

That spring, briefer than apple-blossom's breath, 

Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, 

Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, 

And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.