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August 21, 2021

Summer Sorrow

Leonora Speyer

What shall meadow hold to please me,
Spreading wide its scented waving,
How shall quiet mosses ease me,
Or the night-wind cool my craving?
Hill and hedgerow, cloud-sweet sky,
Echo our good-by.

Bud unplucked and leaf a-quiver,
Bird that lifts a tuneless trilling,
Restless dream of brook and river,
All June’s cup a wasted spilling—
You and I so thirsty-hearted!—
Summer knows us parted.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 21, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Summer Sorrow” appeared in A Canopic Jar (E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921).

Leonora Speyer was born in Washington, D.C., in 1872. She authored Fiddler’s Farewell (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927, and A Canopic Jar (E. P. Dutton, 1921). Speyer died on February 10, 1956, in New York City.

A Canopic Jar
(E. P. Dutton & company, 1921)

“Sonnet 7 [The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings]” by Henry Howard
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“Summer in the South” by Paul Laurence Dunbar
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Thanks to Kazim Ali, author of Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water (Milkweed Editions, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Watch a Q&A about Ali’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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Poem-a-Day - "Summer Sorrow" by Leonora Speyer

Summer Sorrow

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