The Harvest Moon
The Harvest Moon - meaning Summary
Autumn's Luminous Farewell
Longfellow’s poem describes the harvest moon casting a radiant, unifying light over villages, fields, and empty nests. It records seasonal change—birds leaving, harvest work returning—and treats these outer signs as symbols for inner experience. The poem links nature’s visible cycles (flowers, fruits, falling leaves) with human feeling, presenting autumn as both a literal scene and a quiet, reflective moment about loss, departure, and continuity.
Read Complete AnalysesIt is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes And roofs of villages, on woodland crests And their aerial neighborhoods of nests Deserted, on the curtained window-panes Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests! Gone are the birds that were our summer guests, With the last sheaves return the laboring wains! All things are symbols: the external shows Of Nature have their image in the mind, As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves; The song-birds leave us at the summer's close, Only the empty nests are left behind, And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.
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