The Oak-Leaves by Edna St. Vincent Millay — Read

Yet in the end, defeated too, worn out and ready to fall, / Hangs from the drowsy tree with cramped and desperate stem above the ditch the last leaf of all.

There is something to be learned, I guess, from looking at the dead leaves under the living tree;

Something to be set to a lusty tune and learned and sung, it well might be;

Something to be learned-though I was ever a ten-o'clock scholar at this school- / Even perhaps by me.

But my heart goes out to the oak-leaves that are the last to sigh / "Enough," and loose their hold;

They have boasted to the nudging frost and to the two-and-thirty winds that they would never die, / Never even grow old.

(These are those russet leaves that cling / All winter, even into the spring, / To the dormant bough, in the wood knee-deep in snow the only coloured thing.)