Poetry editors are only human, however much they seem to be stern unworldly judges, delivering their Rhadamanthine pronouncements. Alas, hard as it is admit — spoiling the sweet naiveté of our readers, blushing their innocent cheeks — poetry editors, like any other folk, have their overwrought enthusiasms and their sullen hatreds. My talented colleague, Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor, insists so often on work from Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) that the poor woman’s name has become a millstone, dragging me down to a sigh: Teasdale, again? How long, O Lord, how long? And I — yes, even I — nod sometimes in sleepy errors and rise sometimes to overly energetic passions.

My recent enthusiasm for the poetry of Robert Hillyer (1895–1961) is an example of a liking that may be too tender in its newness. Yet no. Hillyer really is worth our reading. Here in the Sun, we’ve featured his poems “Early in the Morning” and “Fog.” And now, for one of the lighter verses we offer every Wednesday, another Hillyer poem — this one about the end of summer, in the voice of an old cow: “There’s no more grass, there’s no more clover / Summer is over, summer is over,” Hillyer writes. In two stanzas of rhymed tetrameter couplets, “Moo!” gives the thoughts of a cow as she contemplates the weary length of her life and the changing of the season.

Moo!
by Robert Hillyer

Summer is over, the old cow said,
And they’ll shut me up in a draughty shed
To milk me by lamplight in the cold,
But I won’t give much for I am old.
It’s long ago that I came here
Gay and slim as a woodland deer;
It’s long ago that I heard the roar
Of Smith’s white bull by the sycamore.
And now there are bones where my flesh should be;
My backbone sags like an old roof tree,
And an apple snatched in a moment’s frolic
Is just so many days of colic.

I’m neither a Jersey nor Holstein now
But only a faded sort of cow.
My calves are veal and I had as lief
That I could lay me down as beef;
Somehow, they always kill by halves, —
Why not take me when they take my calves?
Birch turns yellow and sumac red,
I’ve seen this all before, she said,
I’m tired of the field and tired of the shed
There’s no more grass, there’s no more clover
Summer is over, summer is over.