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. The fine-eared poet may hear the whetting of my scythe. These
two were almost the first grasses that I learned to distinguish, for I had
not known by how many friends I was surrounded,--I had seen them simply as
grasses standing. The purple of their culms also excites me like that of
the Poke-Weed stems.
Think what refuge there is for one, before August is over, from college
commencements and society that isolates! I can skulk amid the tufts
of Purple Wood-Grass on the borders of the "Great Fields." Wherever I
walk these afternoons, the Purple-Fingered Grass also stands like a
guide-board, and points my thoughts to more poetic paths than they have
lately travelled.
A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his head,
and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have cut many
tons of them, littered his stables with them, and fed them to his cattle
for years. Yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he may be overcome
by their beauty. Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there
to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet how long it stands in
vain! I had walked over those Great Fields so many Augusts, and never yet
distinctly recognized these purple companions that I had there.
