Spring and Summer, Fall and Winter and Spring

After each other drifting, past my window drifting!

And I lay so many years watching them drift and counting

The years till a terror came in my heart at times,

With the feeling that I had become eternal; at last

My hundredth year was reached! And still I lay

Hearing the tick of the clock, and the low of cattle

And the scream of a jay flying through falling leaves!

Day after day alone in a room of the house

Of a daughter-in-law stricken with age and gray.

And by night, or looking out of the window by day

My thought ran back, it seemed, through infinite time

To North Carolina and all my girlhood days,

And John, my John, away to the war with the British,

And all the children, the deaths, and all the sorrows.

And that stretch of years like a prairie in Illinois

Through which great figures passed like hurrying horsemen,

Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Clay.

O beautiful young republic for whom my John and I

Gave all of our strength and love!

And O my John!

Why, when I lay so helpless in bed for years,

Praying for you to come, was your coming delayed?

Seeing that with a cry of rapture, like that I uttered

When you found me in old Virginia after the war,

I cried when I beheld you there by the bed,

As the sun stood low in the west growing smaller and fainter

In the light of your face!