Source identified
“A light exists in spring Not present on the year At any other period.”
Dickinson isolates a quality of spring light that feels distinct from ordinary seasonal brightness, making perception itself part of the encounter with nature.
Source note: “A Light Exists in Spring,” in Poems: Third Series (1896), represented through Project Gutenberg #12242. The Gutenberg text reproduces an early edited Dickinson edition, so punctuation and the editorial title are edition-specific rather than claimed as manuscript-final.
Source identified
“Now is the time of plaintive robin-song, When flowers are in their tombs.”
Seasonal decline is compressed into robin-song and buried flowers, giving late autumn an explicitly elegiac atmosphere before the poem turns to the surviving chrysanthemum.
Source note: “The Last Chrysanthemum,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. Floral death is poetic seasonal imagery, not literal human bereavement.
Source identified
“Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall, And saps all retrocede.”
The late-blooming flower appears precisely as the rest of the season retreats, combining natural decline with an image of delayed emergence rather than simple renewal.
Source note: “The Last Chrysanthemum,” Project Gutenberg #3168. The corpse comparison is figurative seasonal language inside the poem.
Source identified
“Besides the autumn poets sing, A few prosaic days A little this side of the snow And that side of the haze.”
Dickinson notices the less celebrated interval between autumn color and winter snow, finding a distinct natural season in days that conventional poetry might overlook.
Source note: “November,” in Poems: Second Series (1891), Project Gutenberg #12242. The passage is tied to the early edited collection and its editorial title.
Source identified
“The morns are meeker than they were, The nuts are getting brown; The berry's cheek is plumper, The rose is out of town.”
Small changes in morning, nuts, berries and roses make the season legible through close observation rather than through an abstract announcement that autumn has arrived.
Source note: “Autumn,” Poems: First Series (1890), Project Gutenberg #12242. The title and punctuation follow the represented early printed edition rather than a modern manuscript-based Dickinson edition.
Source identified
“The poetry of earth is ceasing never.”
Keats closes the sonnet by insisting that nature’s music changes performers with the seasons but never truly stops.
Source note: On the Grasshopper and Cricket, final line; the cricket continues the earth’s poetry in winter.