Among the Leaves
By Ethelwyn Wetherald
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
The near sky, the under sky,
The low sky that I love!
I lie where fallen leaves lie,
With a leafy sky above;
And draw the colored leaves nigh,
And push the withered leaves by,
And feel the woodland heart upon me
brooding like a dove.
The bright sky, the shifting sky,
The sky that Autumn weaves!
I see where scarlet leaves fly
The sky the wind bereaves;
I see the ling’ring leaves die,
I hear the dying leaves sigh,
And breathe the woodland breath made
sweet of all her withered leaves.
Wetherald, Ethelwyn. “Among the Leaves.” Youth’s Companion (October 17, 1895): 490.
Contexts
Based in Boston, the long-lived Youth’s Companion was at one time among America’s most popular children’s magazines. Famous writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, and Booker T. Washington all published in its well-thumbed pages. Among its avid readers was a young Robert Frost. It helped popularize The Pledge of Allegiance, publishing it in its September 8, 1892 issue.
Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary
nigh: near
bereaves: to rob; to deprive of anything valued; to leave destitute, orphaned, or widowed [here, by implication, to sadden]
Resources for Further Study
- “Category: Youth’s Companion.” Wikimedia Commons. This page has some illustrations from the magazine.
- Chris [last name unknown]. “The Youth’s Companion.” This blog has numerous issues, with pictures. The most recent blog pages feature the 1920s.
- Pflieger, Pat. “Youth’s Companion (1827-1929).” Nineteenth-Century American Children and What They Read.
- “The Youth’s Companion.” The Online Books Page. University of Pennsylvania. You can read other selections from the magazine here through HathiTrust (the interface is not particularly user-friendly).
Contemporary Connections
Readers today still value what original readers often called “The Companion.” See Vintage American Ways (a site with some errors, including the magazine’s dates).
“A History of The Youth’s Companion and Pledge of Allegiance with collectors’ notes” on the Collecting Old Magazines site highlights how the issues that contain Emily Dickinson’s poetry and The Pledge of Allegiance are valuable. (this site also has errors, and it misleadingly presents the magazine as “boring.”)
