Explore "A Fruit Piece" by James Whitcomb Riley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The afternoon of summer folds / Its warm arms round the marigolds,
And with its gleaming fingers, pets / The watered pinks and violets
That from the casement vases spill, / Over the cottage window-sill,
Their fragrance down the garden walks / Where droop the dry-mouthed hollyhocks.
How vividly the sunshine scrawls / The grape-vine shadows on the walls!
How like a truant swings the breeze / In high boughs of the apple-trees!
The slender "free-stone" lifts aloof, / Full languidly above the roof,
A hoard of fruitage, stamped with gold / And precious mintings manifold.
High up, through curled green leaves, a pear / Hangs hot with ripeness here and there.
Beneath the sagging trellisings, / In lush, lack-lustre clusterings,
Great torpid grapes, all fattened through / With moon and sunshine, shade and dew,
Until their swollen girths express / But forms of limp deliciousness --
Drugged to an indolence divine / With heaven's own sacramental wine.