Twenty-Five Songs in Five Sets of Five Each: Set I , opus 67

Against the dim hot summer blue
    Yon wave of white wild-roses lies,
    Watching with listless golden eyes
The green leaves shutting out their view,
    The tiny leaves whose motions bright
    Are like small wings of emerald light:

White butterflies like snow-flakes fall
And brown bees drone their honey-call.

The pale tints of the twilight fields
    Have turnèd into burnished gold,
    For waves of yellow light have rolled
From the open'd east across the wealds
    While 'mid the wheat spires far behind
    Stirs lazily the awaken'd wind.

A skylark high (a song-made bird)
Sings as though God his singing heard.

The first snows of the year lie white
Upon the branches bending low;
A surging wind the flakes doth blow
Before the coming feet of Night --
Half dusk, half day, betwixt the pines
Green-yellow the full moon reclines

Green-yellow, and now wholly green,
While faint the windy stars are seen.

Softly sailing emerald lights
    Above the cornfields come and go,
    Listlessly wandering to and fro
The magic of these July nights
    Has surely even pierced down deep
    Where the earth's jewels unharmed sleep,

And filled with fire the emeralds there
And raised them thus to the outer air.

The wintry wolds are white; the wind
    Seems frozen; in the shelter'd nooks
    The sparrows shiver; the black rooks
Wheel homeward where the elms behind
    The manor stand; at the field's edge
    The redbreasts in the blackthorn hedge

Sit close and under snowy eaves
The shrewmice sleep 'mid nested leaves.