Winter Comes to Nargothrond

The summer slowly in the sad forest
waned and faded. In the west arose
winds that wandered over warring seas.
Leaves were loosened from labouring boughs:
fallow-gold they fell, and the feet buried
of trees standing tall and naked,
rustling restlessly down roofless aisles,
shifting and drifting.

The shining vessel

of the sailing moon with slender mast,
with shrouds shapen of shimmering flame,
uprose ruddy on the rim of Evening
by the misty wharves on the margin of the world.
With winding horns winter hunted
in the weeping woods, wild and ruthless;
sleet came slashing, and slanting hail
from glowering heaven grey and sunless,
whistling whiplash whirled by tempest.
The floods were freed and fallow waters
sweeping seaward, swollen, angry,
filled with flotsam, foaming, turbid,
passed in tumult. The tempest died.
Frost descended from far mountains
steel-cold and still. Stony-glinting
icehung evening was opened wide,
a dome of crystal over deep silence,
over windless wastes and woods standing
as frozen phantoms under flickering stars.

-written by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien on Oxford paper in 1924 or 1925