Listen …
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.
Credits
Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet (1878–1914) best known for inventing the cinquain, a five-line syllabic verse form — and "November Night" is a precise, elegant example of that form in practice. Writing much of her most celebrated work while ill with tuberculosis, Crapsey brought an acute sensitivity to transience and silence that gives even her shortest poems a quietly devastating weight.
