quotations about leaves
Each particle of matter is an immensity, each leaf a world, each insect an inexplicable compendium.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Physiognomy
Listen! the wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, we have had our summer evenings, now for October eves.
HUMBERT WOLFE
P.L.M.: Peoples, Landfalls, Mountains
A tangerine and russet cascade of kaleidoscopic leaves, creates a tapestry of autumn magic upon the emerald carpet of fading summer.
JUDITH A. LINDBERG
The Organic View
The stripped and shapely
Maple grieves
The ghosts of her
Departed leaves.
JOHN UPDIKE
A Child's Calendar
The fall of leaves is an emblem of the decline of life.
R. TREVOR
attributed, Day's Collacon
Are ye the ghosts of fallen leaves,
O flakes of snow,
For which, through naked trees, the winds
A-mourning go?
JOHN BANISTER TABB
"Phantoms", Poems
In the whisper of the leaves appears an interchange of love.
WILLIAM JONES
attributed, Day's Collacon
The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
"The Seasons", Pages from An Old Volume: A Collection of Essays
The woods are hush'd, their music is no more;
The leaf is dead, the yearning past away;
New leaf, new life--the days of frost are o'er;
New life, new love, to suit the newer day:
New loves are sweet as those that went before:
Free love--free field--we love but while we may.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Idylls of the King
A chaplet of leaves crowns the victor.
VIRGIL
attributed, Day's Collacon
I saw the sunlight in a leafy place,
Bathing itself in liquid green and amber--
Where every flower had tears hid in its petals,
And every leaf was lovely with the rain.
ERNEST RHYS
"April Romance", The Leaf Burners and Other Poems
Every leaf is a spacious plain; every line a flowing brook; every period a lofty mountain.
JAMES HERVEY
Meditations Among the Tombs
Ho! for the leaves that eddy down,
Crumpled yellow and withered brown,
Hither and yonder and up the street
And trampled under the passing feet;
Swirling, billowing, drifting by,
With a whisper soft and a rustling sigh,
Starting aloft to windy ways,
Telling the coming of bonfire days.
GRACE STRICKLER DAWSON
"Bonfire Days"
O bring me a leaf from the Old Forest,
A token so sacred, O bring;
'Twill recall those bright scenes to remembrance,
Old friendships around it will cling.
JOHN D. COSSAR
"A Leaf From the Old Forest"
The calm shade
Shall bring a kindred calm, and the sweet breeze
That makes the green leaves dance, shall waft a balm
To thy sick heart.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
"Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"
What if the leaves were to fall a-weeping, and say, "It will be so painful for us to be pulled from our stalks, when autumn comes?" Foolish fear! Summer goes, and autumn succeeds. The glory of death is upon the leaves; and the gentlest breeze that blows takes them softly and silently from the bough, and they float slowly down, like fiery sparks, upon the moss.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Where is the pride of Summer--the green prime--
The many, many leaves all twinkling?--three
On the mossed elm; three on the naked lime
Trembling--and one upon the old oak tree!
Where is the Dryad's immortality?
THOMAS HOOD
"Ode--Autumn"
I love the chill October days, when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden underneath your feet.
JEROME K. JEROME
"Silhouettes"
One skeleton-leaf, white-ribbed, a last year's leaf,
Skipped in a paltry gust, whizzed from the dust,
Leapt the small dusty puddle; and sailing then
Merrily in the sunlight, lodged itself
Between two blossoms in a hawthorn tree.
That was the moment: and the world was changed.
With that insane gay skeleton of a leaf
A world of dead worlds flew to hawthorn trees,
Lodged in the green forks, rattled, rattled their ribs
(As loudly as a dead leaf's ribs can rattle)
Blithely, among bees and blossoms. I cursed,
I shook my stick, dislodged it. To what end?
Its ribs, and all the ribs of all dead worlds,
Would house them now forever as death should:
Cheek by jowl with May.
CONRAD AIKEN
"Dead Leaf in May"
Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable; they even dance; yet God has made them part of oak; in so doing He has given us a lesson not to deny the stout-heartedness within, because we see the lightsomeness without.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
attributed, Guesses at Truth