Algy perched on one of his favourite rocks, and gazed at the hills, the sea and the sky. The colours were still beautiful, but the sun was much lower in the sky now, and the wind had a bitter edge to it. Algy knew that summer was over for this year, and he remembered a poem by a famous American poet:

          An agitation of the air,
          A perturbation of the light
          Admonished me the unloved year
          Would turn on its hinge that night.
 
          I stood in the disenchanted field
          Amid the stubble and the stones,
          Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
          The song of my marrow-bones.
 
          Blue poured into summer blue,
          A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
          The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
          That part of my life was over.
 
          Already the iron door of the north
          Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
          Order their populations forth,
          And a cruel wind blows.

[Algy is quoting the poem End of Summer by the 20th century American Poet Laureate, Stanley Kunitz.]

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