Last night, just as the tints of autumn's sky <br />Of sunset faded from our hills and streams, <br />I sat, vague listening, lapped in twilight dreams, <br />To the leaf's rustle, and the cricket's cry. <br /> <br />Then, like that basket, flush with summer fruit, <br />Dropped by the angels at the Prophet's foot, <br />Came, unannounced, a gift of clustered sweetness, <br />Full-orbed, and glowing with the prisoned beams <br />Of summery suns, and rounded to completeness <br />By kisses of the south-wind and the dew. <br />Thrilled with a glad surprise, methought I knew <br />The pleasure of the homeward-turning Jew, <br />When Eshcol's clusters on his shoulders lay, <br />Dropping their sweetness on his desert way. <br /> <br />I said, 'This fruit beseems no world of sin. <br />Its parent vine, rooted in Paradise, <br />O'ercrept the wall, and never paid the price <br />Of the great mischief,--an ambrosial tree, <br />Eden's exotic, somehow smuggled in, <br />To keep the thorns and thistles company.' <br />Perchance our frail, sad mother plucked in haste <br />A single vine-slip as she passed the gate, <br />Where the dread sword alternate paled and burned, <br />And the stern angel, pitying her fate, <br />Forgave the lovely trespasser, and turned <br />Aside his face of fire; and thus the waste <br />And fallen world hath yet its annual taste <br />Of primal good, to prove of sin the cost, <br />And show by one gleaned ear the mighty harvest lost.<br /><br />John Greenleaf Whittier<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-fruit-gift/
