No More Learning

On warm hillsides its stems are ripe
by the twenty-third of August. At that date I walked through a
beautiful grove of them, six or seven feet high, on the side of one of
our cliffs, where they ripen early. Quite to the ground they were a
deep, brilliant purple, with a bloom contrasting with the still clear
green leaves. It appears a rare triumph of Nature to have produced and
perfected such a plant, as if this were enough for a summer. What a
perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life
concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature.
What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in
the midst of our decay, like the poke! I confess that it excites me to
behold them. I cut one for a cane, for I would fain handle and lean on
it. I love to press the berries between my fingers, and see their
juice staining my hand. To walk amid these upright, branching casks of
purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting each one
with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on a London dock, what a
privilege! For Nature's vintage is not confined to the vine. Our poets
have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they
never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the
singers. Indeed, this has been called by some the American grape, and,
though a native of America, its juices are used in some foreign
countries to improve the color of the wine; so that the poetaster may
be celebrating the virtues of the poke without knowing it. Here are
berries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal
with, if you will.
And what flutes its ensanguined stems would make,
to be used in such a dance! It is truly a royal plant. I could spend
the evening of the year musing amid the poke stems. And perchance amid
these groves might arise at last a new school of philosophy or poetry.
It lasts all through September.

At the same time with this, or near the end of August, a to me very
interesting genus of grasses, andropogons, or beard-grasses, is in its
prime: _Andropogon furcatus_, forked beard-grass, or call it
purple-fingered grass; _Andropogon scoparius_, purple wood-grass; and
_Andropogon_ (now called _Sorghum_) _nutans_, Indian-grass. The first
is a very tall and slender-culmed grass, three to seven feet high,
with four or five purple finger-like spikes raying upward from the
top. The second is also quite slender, growing in tufts two feet high
by one wide, with culms often somewhat curving, which, as the spikes
go out of bloom, have a whitish, fuzzy look. These two are prevailing
grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hillsides. The
culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple
tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps I have
the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer,
and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like
ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest.
Only the August sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves.
The farmer has long since done his upland haying, and he will not
condescend to bring his scythe to where these slender wild grasses
have at length flowered thinly; you often see spaces of bare sand amid
them. But I walk encouraged between the tufts of purple wood-grass
over the sandy fields, and along the edge of the shrub oaks, glad to
recognize these simple contemporaries. With thoughts cutting a broad
swathe I "get" them, with horse-raking thoughts I gather them into
windrows.