Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Harvest Moon
Listen to an audio narration of The Harvest Moon by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, read by Bob Rutan
It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
Of Nature have their image in the mind,
As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer’s close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.
Resources
The Harvest Moon by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Performed by Bob Rutan. YouTube, 2025.
Hollet, Jeff. Full Harvest Moon. 2018, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
