A Winter Day

Marcella Agnes Fitzgerald

Great waves of sunlight all our land are flooding—
   Our glorious land, so verdant and so fair,
Where peaceful labor o’er the scene is brooding,
   And bird-songs burden all the balmy air,

From north to south, yea, to the bounds of vision,
   We gaze on naught but beauty’s perfect lines—
Vales that recall the fabled fields Elysian,
   And dells that echo to the singing pines.

Storm-swept, but scathless, Santa Anna towers
   With the proud monarchs of our eastern heights;
And westward, redwood forests, home of flowers
   And ferns and birds, awaken new delights.

The lofty mountain-sides are deeply rifted
  With lovely glens where fairies might abide,
Where through the long, long summer days lie drifted
   The sweet wild blooms above the stream’s clear tide.

And, nestling calmly on the valley’s bosom,
   The quiet village slumbers in the sun—
A tiny germ that yet shall bud and blossom
   When Art and Labor have their triumph won.

Behold how, through the clear, still air ascending,
   Blue wreaths of smoke from many hearths arise,
Higher and higher, till their vapory blending
   Is lost amid the azure of the skies,

Like incense rising from the sacred altar
   Of homes where Peace and Plenty ever reign;
For who is there with trembling tongue can falter
   Of want-born woe upon our Western plain,

While toil can wrest from out the valley’s bosom
   The farmer’s wealth, the sheaves of golden grain,
And the great orchards burst from bud to blossom
   With promise of the autumn’s glittering gain?

Toil, honest toil—the meed is worth the winning,
   The joys that only honest labors bring;
Toil and be hopeful with the year’s beginning,
   And its glad promise of a glorious spring.

All, all is peaceful as a poet’s dreaming,
   This peerless day so wondrous bright and mild;
And yet beneath this emerald banner streaming
   We hail the King in other lands so wild.

No sound of discord comes to mar the quiet,
   The holy quiet, of this winter scene,
Save when the chattering blackbirds’ merry riot
   Disturbs the woodland solitudes serene,

Or where the hungry rooks in clouds assemble
   To scold and wrangle o’er the new-turned sod.
But hark! hark how the air is all a-tremble
   With the glad hymn the lark outpours to God.

Grant, Heavenly Father, that within our valley
   No ruder strains may in the future rise;
That never here may wake War’s dreaded rally,
   Nor battle-smoke bedim these azure skies;

And that, within the New Year spread before us,
   Our feet may tread the path thy Saints have trod,
And thy bright angels watching ever o’er us
   Lead us in safety to thy home, O God! 

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 14, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“A Winter Day” appears in Marcella Agnes Fitzgerald’s poetry volume Poems (Catholic Publication Society Co., 1886).

Marcella Agnes Fitzgerald, born in 1845, is the author of a single poetry volume titled Poems (Catholic Publication Society Co., 1886). There is speculation that Fitzgerald was a nun who later went to France, but little is known about her life and her death.

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