Baby of Mine

Baby mine, don't you cry.
Baby mine, dry your eyes.
Rest your head close to my heart,
never to part,
baby of mine.

Little one when you play,
don't you mind what they say.
Let those eyes sparkle and shine,
never a tear,
baby of mine.

If they knew sweet little you
they'd end up loving you too.
All of those people who scold you
what they'd give just for the right to hold you.

From your head down to your toes,
you're not much, goodness knows.
But you're so precious to me,
sweet as can be,
baby of mine.

If they knew sweet little you,
they'd end up loving you too.
All those same people who scold you,
what they'd give just for the right to hold you.

From your head down to your toes
you're not much, goodness knows.
But you're so precious to me,
sweet as can be,
baby of mine.
Baby of mine

Frost at Midnight

The Island/ Albert Bierstadt

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud---and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.
But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shall learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

October's Bright Blue Weather

Jasper Francis Cropsey/Autumn on the Hudson

O suns and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October's bright blue weather;

When loud the bumblebee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And goldenrod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When gentians roll their fingers tight
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October's bright blue weather.

O sun and skies and flowers of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October's bright blue weather. 


Helen Hunt Jackson

Poem In October

Autumn In America/Albert Bierstadt

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

      And the mussel pooled and the heron

                  Priested shore

            The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

            Myself to set foot

                  That second

      In the still sleeping town and set forth.

      My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

      Above the farms and the white horses

                  And I rose

            In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

            Over the border

                  And the gates

      Of the town closed as the town awoke.

      A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

      Blackbirds and the sun of October

                  Summery

            On the hill’s shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

            To the rain wringing

                  Wind blow cold

      In the wood faraway under me.

      Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

      With its horns through mist and the castle

                  Brown as owls

            But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

            There could I marvel

                  My birthday

      Away but the weather turned around.

      It turned away from the blithe country

And down the other air and the blue altered sky

      Streamed again a wonder of summer

                  With apples

            Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

            Through the parables

                  Of sun light

      And the legends of the green chapels

      And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.

      These were the woods the river and sea

                  Where a boy

            In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

            And the mystery

                  Sang alive

      Still in the water and singingbirds.

      And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

      Joy of the long dead child sang burning

                  In the sun.

            It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

            O may my heart’s truth

                  Still be sung

      On this high hill in a year’s turning.

Dylan Thomas