By all these lovely tokens September days are here, With summer's best of weather, And autumn's best of cheer.

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885), a prominent American poet and prose writer, is best known today for her lyric nature poems and for later advocacy writing on Native American rights. This stanza is from her poem “September,” a seasonal lyric that celebrates the transitional moment when late-summer warmth lingers even as autumn’s colors and moods arrive. The poem reflects a common 19th-century American poetic interest in the natural calendar and in reading emotional or moral meaning in landscape. Jackson’s New England background and her long-standing habit of observing and recording seasonal change inform the poem’s affectionate, sensory catalog of “tokens” that signal September’s arrival.

The lines present September as a month of balance and reconciliation: it offers “summer’s best of weather” (pleasant warmth without summer’s excess) alongside “autumn’s best of cheer” (the beauty and conviviality associated with harvest and changing leaves). The phrase “lovely tokens” suggests that the season announces itself through small, observable signs—colors, light, air, and ripening fields—inviting attentiveness to nature’s subtle shifts. In a broader sense, the stanza idealizes transition itself: change need not be loss, but can combine the finest qualities of what is ending and what is beginning, making September a metaphor for graceful passage between stages of life.