George H. Ragsdale's 1878 "Autumn Reverie"

There's nothing remarkable about the following --- other than the fact it was written at all. Weekly newspaper editors during the 1870s generally were so busy pontificating about politics that they hadn't time to look around and note their natural surroundings.

So the "Autumn Reverie" written by George H. Ragsdale and published in his Chariton Patriot of Nov. 6, 1878, is a rarity. I've added a more recent photo taken at Red Haw State Park, a spot not dreamed of then. 

A couple of things puzzle me. I'm not sure why the turnups were rejoicing if their fate was to be livestock forage. It's a bit of anthropomorphic imagery that doesn't quite work. And how long has it been since you've seen the world "indite" used as a synonym for "compose"?

Whatever the case, here's George's reverie:

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All hail the dreamy, smoky, lovely, balmy Indian Summer. The autumn-tinted woods are stirred with whispering winds, and echo to the roar of the sportsman's gun. Chattering squirrels scurry up the scaly sides of the giant shell-bark, and whisk their candle plumage in the forks thereof. There is a rain of dropping nuts.

The mournful caterpillar, with premonition of final doom, crawls slowly over the tinted leaves and the prudent ant, apprehensive of evil days, drags to its winter retreat a bountiful supply of provender. The voice of the wood and coal-hauler, swearing at his mules, is heard daily in our streets. 

The golden pumpkin gleams between the rows of fading corn and basks in the warm sunshine while the nitrogenous cabbage scratches its head and wonders how long this thing is going to last. The sad-eyed turnup, whose white globe showers out from beneath the green like a door knob in a radish bed, yields itself to the niggling sheep and the foraging cow and rejoices that autumn has come.

The belated butterfly beats the lazy air with feeble wing; the voice of the katydid is hushed in the land, and the debilitated grasshopper, with the chill of recent frosty nights in his bones, tries in vain to frisk about in the stubble while the tails of the bounding lambs glean the burs from the pastures brown and the breeches of the hunter are frescoed with beggar lice.

It is a time to dream, to repent of one's sins, to lay in winter provender and look around and see who keeps the biggest woodpile, and above all to indite a few lines of poetry and moralize upon the falling and fading leaf. Contributors who are struggling with thoughts upon these subjects are advised to hurry up, else the bright creatures of their fancy will be caught by the first Iowa zephyr as the old year fades away, and they will be stricken with the deadly blight of the waste basket or wintered over.