Oh, little thought that lady proud, And silk was changed for shroud! Nor thought that gardener, (full of scorns To me upon my low moss seat, It did not move my grief to see Friends, blame me not! a narrow ken Hath childhood 'twixt the sun and sward; We draw the moral afterward, We feel the gladness then. And gladdest hours for me did glide In silence at the rose-tree wall: Nor he nor I did e'er incline To peck or pluck the blossoms white; To make my hermit-home complete, And cresses glossy wet. The Deserted Garden And so, I thought, my likeness grew To "gentle hermit of the dale," For oft I read within my nook If I shut this wherein I write, My childhood from my life is parted, The garden is deserted. Another thrush may there rehearse Ah Do sing a sadder verse. me, ah me! when erst I lay In that child's-nest so greenly wrought, And still I laughed, and did not fear I knew the time would pass away, Did I look up to pray! 1409 The time is past; and now that grows As well as the white rose, When graver, meeker thoughts are given, It something saith for earthly pain, Elizabeth Barrett Browning [1806-1861] A FORSAKEN GARDEN IN a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, The ghost of a garden fronts the sea. A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses The steep, square slope of the blossomless bed Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses Now lie dead. The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken, Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand? The dense, hard passage is blind and stifled The thorns he spares when the rose is taken; The rocks are left when he wastes the plain. The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken, These remain. 1411 Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not; The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels In a round where life seems barren as death. Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping Years ago. Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither," Did he whisper? "Look forth from the flowers to the sea; For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither, And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened, In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened, Or they loved their life through, and then went whither? And were one to the end-but what end who knows? Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither, As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose. They are loveless now as the grass above them Or the wave. All are at one now, roses and lovers, Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea. Not a breath of the time that has been hovers In the air now soft with a summer to be. Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter Here death may deal not again forever; Here change may come not till all change end. From the graves they have made they shall rise up never, Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, Death lies dead. Algernon Charles Swinburne [1837-1909] GREEN THINGS GROWING O THE green things growing, the green things growing, I should like to live, whether I smile or grieve, Just to watch the happy life of my green things growing. O the fluttering and the pattering of those green things growing! How they talk each to each, when none of us are knowing; In the wonderful white of the weird moonlight Or the dim dreamy dawn when the cocks are crowing. |