The Summer has come and the Summer is past,
And "the man with the hoe," he is out of a job,The pastures are bare and are swept by the blast,
And the cattle for grass must eat "corn on the cob,"
While scraggy-haired colts are turned out to the stalks,
But the woodman he whistles a tune as he walks.

The Summer brings harvest of oats and of wheat,
And the meadows are strewn with the fragrant new hay;
And Autumn gives apples, and pumpkin and beet,
And the fruits and the nuts make the gatherers gay;
But fruits for the cellar and wheat for the stacks
Have a rival in the harvest of the wood chopper's ax.

The scythe is keen edged and the sword is a power,
And the reaper, old Time, mows a path thro' the years,
And age falls in ripeness and childhood in flower,
And the sword hews a channel for blood and for tears;
But the woodman he smites with a stroke that ne'er tires,
For his ax cleaves the wood for the home-altar fires.

The snowflakes have wrapped in white down the dark earth,
And the woods a black fringe show against the cold sky;
When all appears dead that in Summer had birth,
And there's not a bird songster a solo to try,
Then cheery as notes of the robin in Spring
Does the ax of the woodman re-echo and ring.

A man of wood-craft the good axman is he,
He knows well the name and the nature of wood,
Can chip, and make fall any sort of a tree
In the very direction he willed that it should;
And when it is down on its body he stands,
And he severs the giant, with the ax in his hands.

This man of the woods is a surgeon of trees,
He can chop a straight cut or a flying slant chip,
He can halve with his wedge, if it so should him please,
And can quarter, and heart, and around the knot slip,
'Til body and limbs into cordwood he racks,
For an artist is he with the wedge and the ax.

He swings his great maul like the hammer of Thor,
And the cord-lengths fly open of oak and of beach,
'Till the clearing at last is with wood scattered o'er,
And heaped up as high as the chopper can reach
Are the tepees of brush that the axman has made
In the places where trees by his ax were low laid.

All corded and straight thro' the Summer shall lie
All the wood that the woodman in Winter has chopped,
In wind and in sun will the sticks slowly dry,
And when Winter again plow and reaper has stopped,
The farmer to sheds with his horses will draw
What the axman has cut for the buck and the saw.

And often the farmer, the evening before,
Will upon his red wagon pile up a good load
To haul it to town for some dwelling or store,
And the wheels of his broad-tread will sing on the road,
With four horses drawing it over the snow,
For the axman's dry wood to the city must go.
 
By Horrace Dumont Herr.