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Midsummer

By Robert Fitzgerald 1910–1985 Robert Fitzgerald

The adolescent night, breath of the town,

Porchswings and whispers, maple leaves unseen

Deploying moonlight quieter than a man dead

After the locust’s song. These homes were mine

And are not now forever, these on the steps

Children I think removed to many places,

Lost among hushed years, and so strangely known.

This business is well ended. If in the dark

The firefly made his gleam and sank therefrom,

Yet someone’s hand would have him, the wet grass

Bed him no more. From corners of the lawn

The dusk-white dresses flutter and are past.

Before our bed time there were things to say,

Remembering tree-bark, crickets, and the first star…

After, and as the sullenness of time

Went on from summer, here in a land alien

Made I my perfect fears and flower of thought:

Sleep being no longer swift in the arms of pain,

Revisitations are convenient with a cough,

And there is something I would say again

If I had not forever, if there were time.

Robert Fitzgerald, “Midsummer” from Spring Shade: Poems 1931-1970. Copyright © 1969 by Robert Fitzgerald. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: Poetry (August 1931).

Biography

Robert Fitzgerald (1910 - 1985) was born in Springfield, Illinois, and attended Harvard University, where he received an excellent education in the classics. After college, he started to translate Greek poetry to keep up his skills. They were published and soon earned him the reputation as one of the best Greek translators in English. Though more known for his translations, Fitzgerald is also a poet in his own right. In poems . . .

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