Fontainebleau by Sara Teasdale

Interminable palaces front on the green parterres, / And ghosts of ladies lovely and immoral / Glide down the gilded stairs, / The high cold corridors are clicking with the heel taps / That long ago were theirs.

But in the sunshine, in the vague autumn sunshine, / The geometric gardens are desolately gay; / The crimson and scarlet and rose-red dahlias / Are painted like the ladies who used to pass this way / With a ringletted monarch, a Henry or a Louis / On a lost October day.

The aisles of the garden lead into the forest, / The aisles lead into autumn, a damp wind grieves, / Ghostly kings are hunting, the boar breaks cover, / But the sounds of horse and horn are hushed in falling leaves, / Four centuries of autumns, four centuries of leaves.