Explore "The Pewee" by O. Henry on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In the hush of the drowsy afternoon. / When the very mind on the breast of June / Lies settled, and hot white tracery / Of the shattered sunlight flitters free / Through the unstinted leaves to the pied cool sward, / On a dead tree branch sings the saddest bard / Of the birds that be. / 'Tis the lone pewee; / Its note is a sob, and its song is pitched / In a single key like a soul bewitched / To a mournful minstrelsy.
"Pewee, Pewee," doth it ever cry; / A sad, sweet, minor threnody / That threads the aisles of the dim hot grove / Like a tale of a wrong or a vanished love, / And the fancy comes that the wee dun bird / Perchance was a maid, and her heart was stirred / By some lover's rhyme / In a golden time, / And broke when the world turned false and old; / And her dreams grew dark and her faith grew cold, / In some fairy far-off clime. / And her soul crept into the pewee's breast; / And forever she cries with a strange unrest / For something lost, in the afternoon; / For something missed from the lavish June; / For the heart, that died in the long ago; / For the livelong pain that pierceth so; / Thus the pewee cries, / While the evening lies / Steeped in the languorous still sunshine, / Rapt, to the leaf and the bough and the vine, / Of some hopeless paradise.