Chestnutting

Chestnutting

The morning is crispy and splendid!
    October, the king of the year,
With glory and plenty attended,
    Is holding high festival here.
He has planted his tents, and his banners unrolled.
Till our Hills are ablaze with his purple and gold.

“Hurrah!” while the lichens and grasses
    Are flashing with blossoms of frost,
That shout from the lads and the lasses
    A merry hill-echo has tost
As over the fences they tumble and leap
And scurry away to the forest like sheep.

The chestnut, so burly and tawny,
    Has opened his jacket of green;
Rolled back on its bristle-nap thorny
    Its lining of velvet is seen;
And the laugh of the squirrel is heard from the tree,
To the laugh of the children an answering glee.

“Look out!” ‘Tis the shout of the leader,
    His club whirling up like a flail;
From the path of that challenging cedar
    Is a rattle and clash as of hail.
The brown nuts peep from the fringes of grass,
Like the hazel eyes of the bonniest lass.

The squirrel, defrauded, sits scolding
    And tossing his plume in disgust;
His cheeks are too swollen for holding
    His rage, and the nits he had thrust
In those duplicate pockets, so ready and tough
That yet, like a boy’s, will hold never enough.

Ha, no! not a squirrel so nimbler
    As up to the loftiest bough
Goes one never fashioned to tremble,
    And smites with a heart-quaking blow;
New showers rattle down at the club’s deep jar,
New glee bubbles up in his proud hurrah!

Now the red sun of October
    Has stooped from his hazy noon,
And the merry chits, grown sober,
    A-weary all too soon,
With the gathered wealth of the golden trees,
Wend slowly back to their cottages.

But after the dying autumn
    Has gone to its snowy pall,
This day and the joy it brough them
    Will the tawny nuts recall,
As named for a lad and a lass, in pairs,
They crackle and leap where the hearth-fire flares.