Endowed in perpetuity by the Glenna Luschei Fund for Excellence

Autumnals

Autumnals

By Mabel Langdon

These are
Your strange cold words
That drip upon my heart
Like rain in autumn - blackening
Autumn trees.

My heart
A yellow leaf
Made for the frost to sere
And winds to toss about - and feet
To trample.

What then
Say you, O Time?
"The years will mark your soul
With tear-stains of remembering - and
Dark pain."

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Fall 1929), p. 291

Biography

Mabel Langdon

Mabel Langdon was associated with the College of Fine Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln at the time her poem “Autumnals” was published in 1929. She later moved to Pennsylvania with her husband, anthropologist and poet (and editor of Prairie Schooner) Loren Eiseley. She became the assistant director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She died in 1986.

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