Poet's Choice

Thus quietly thy summer goes,

Thy days declining to repose.

Smit with these charms, that must decay,

I grieve to see thy future doom;

They died -- nor were those flowers less gay,

(The flowers that did in Eden bloom)

Unpitying frosts, and Autumn's power

Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

From morning suns and evening dews

At first, thy little being came:

If nothing once, you nothing lose,

For when you die you are the same;

The space between is but an hour,

The mere idea of a flower.

Freneau, a contemporary and colleague of John Madison and Thomas Jefferson, is, like Bradstreet, a poetic ancestor whose work remains alive and vivid.

(Anne Bradstreet's and Philip Freneau's poems can be found in "American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." Penguin Putnam ¿ 2007 by Literary Classics of the United States.)