Rebecca WassonSpring and Summer, Fall and Winter and Spring,After each other drifting, past my window drifting!And I lay so many years watching them drift and countingThe years till a terror came in my heart at times,With the feeling that I had become eternal; at lastMy hundredth year was reached! And still I layHearing the tick of the clock, and the low of cattleAnd the scream of a jay flying through falling leaves!Day after day alone in a room of the houseOf a daughter-in-law stricken with age and gray.And by night, or looking out of the window by dayMy thought ran back, it seemed, through infinite timeTo North Carolina and all my girlhood days,And John, my John, away to the war with the British,And all the children, the deaths, and all the sorrows.And that stretch of years like a prairie in IllinoisThrough which great figures passed like hurrying horsemen,Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Clay.O beautiful young republic for whom my John and IGave all of our strength and love!And O my John!Why, when I lay so helpless in bed for years,Praying for you to come, was your coming delayed?Seeing that with a cry of rapture, like that I utteredWhen you found me in old Virginia after the war,I cried when I beheld you there by the bed,As the sun stood low in the west growing smaller and fainterIn the light of your face!
Spring and Summer, Fall and Winter and Spring,After each other drifting, past my window drifting!And I lay so many years watching them drift and countingThe years till a terror came in my heart at times,With the feeling that I had become eternal; at lastMy hundredth year was reached! And still I layHearing the tick of the clock, and the low of cattleAnd the scream of a jay flying through falling leaves!Day after day alone in a room of the houseOf a daughter-in-law stricken with age and gray.And by night, or looking out of the window by dayMy thought ran back, it seemed, through infinite timeTo North Carolina and all my girlhood days,And John, my John, away to the war with the British,And all the children, the deaths, and all the sorrows.And that stretch of years like a prairie in IllinoisThrough which great figures passed like hurrying horsemen,Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Clay.O beautiful young republic for whom my John and IGave all of our strength and love!And O my John!Why, when I lay so helpless in bed for years,Praying for you to come, was your coming delayed?Seeing that with a cry of rapture, like that I utteredWhen you found me in old Virginia after the war,I cried when I beheld you there by the bed,As the sun stood low in the west growing smaller and fainterIn the light of your face!