The Harvest Moon by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow A touch of cold in the Autumn night 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.