You hear him in the springtime
When radiant sunlight fills
The verdant, sweeping valleys
And the hollows of the hills;
On moonlight nights in summer
From the summit of a tree,
He is weaving strains entrancing
In flights of ecstasy.
In autumn's richest splendor
When the woodland seems afire
I have heard him chanting softly
From a fence of old barbed wire;
In dreary, bleak December
Where the ragged cedars spread
I have seen him gray, and sullen,
And silent as the dead.