University of Virginia Library

SONNETS AND OTHER POEMS ON BIRDS, INSECTS, AND FLOWERS.

HUMMING BIRDS.

THE CRICKET.

LINES WRITTEN OPPOSITE A DRAWING OF A PARROT AND BUTTERFLY.

Bright creatures are ye, bird and butterfly,
The joyous progeny of the breeding sun,
Who worked below, his “'prentice hand to try,”
On topaz, ruby, and carnelian.
Then, breathing upwards, first essayed the rose,
Sweet emanation of the soul of earth;
Then would the gilded fly its wings disclose,
Proud of the beauty of its gorgeous birth.
But brightest gems would murmur, if they might,
Because for woman, not themselves, they glow.
Blest are the insects, brood of warmth and light,
Who feel their life, how brief they cannot know;
But happier far the bird that can repeat
Sweet words, by sweeter lips made doubly sweet.

[Who would have thought, upon this icy cliff]

THE NIGHTINGALE.

A mighty bard there was, in joy of youth,
That wont to rove the vernal groves among,
When the green oak puts forth its scallop'd tooth,
And daisies thick the darkening fallows throng;
He listen'd oft, whene'er he sought to soothe
A fancied sorrow with a fancied song,
For Philomela's ancient tale of ruth,
And never heard it, all the long night long;
But heard, instead, so glad a strain of sound,
So many changes of continuous glee,
From lowest twitter, such a quick rebound,
To billowy height of troubled ecstasy—
Rejoice! he said, for joyfully had he found
That mighty poets may mistaken be.

THE CUCKOO.

Thou indefatigable cuckoo! still
Thy iteration says the self-same thing,
And thou art still an utterance of the spring
As constant as a self-determined will.
The quiet patience of a murmuring rill
Had no beginning and will have no ending;
But thou art aye beginning, never blending
With thrush on perch, or lark upon the wing.
Methinks thou art a type of some recluse
Whose notes of adoration never vary:
Who of the gift of speech will make no use
But ever to repeat her Ave Mary.—
Two syllables alone to thee were given,
What mean they in the dialect of heaven?

THE ANEMONE.

Who would have thought a thing so slight,
So frail a birth of warmth and light,
A thing as weak as fear or shame,
Bearing thy weakness in thy name,—
Who would have thought of finding thee,
Thou delicate Anemone,
Whose faintly tinted petals may
By any wind be torn away,
Whose many anthers with their dust,
And the dark purple dome their centre,
When winter strikes, soon as it likes,
Will quit their present rest, and must
Hurry away on wild adventure?
What power has given thee to outlast
The pelting rain, the driving blast;
To sit upon thy slender stem,
A solitary diadem,
Adorning latest autumn with
A relic sweet of vernal pith?
Oh Heaven! if, as faithful I believe,
Thou wilt the prayer of faithful love receive,
Let it be so with me! I was a child—
Of large belief, though froward, wild.
Gladly I listened to the holy word,
And deem'd my little prayers to God were heard.
All things I loved, however strange or odd,
As deeming all things were beloved by God.
In youth and manhood's careful sultry hours,
The garden of my youth bore many flowers
That now are faded; but my early faith,
Though thinner far than vapour, spectre, wraith,
Lighter than aught the rude wind blows away,
Has yet outlived the rude tempestuous day,
And may remain, a witness of the spring,
A sweet, a holy, and a lovely thing;
The promise of another spring to me,
My lovely, lone, and lost Anemone!

EUPHRASIA OFFICINALIS, OR EYE-BRIGHT.

THE COWSLIP.

Lady, beyond the wide Atlantic main
Huge trees hast thou beheld, and gorgeous flowers,
And poor may be to thee, and dim, and plain
The simple posies of this isle of ours;
Yet, lady, humbly I present to thee
A flower refined in her simplicity.
The lady cowslip, that, amid the grass,
Is tall and comely as a virgin queen.
The primrose is a bonny peasant lass,
The bold and full-blown beauty of the green;
She seems on mossy bank, in forest glade,
Most meet to be the cowslip's waiting maid.
But the coy cowslip—coy, though doom'd to stand
In state erect upon the open field—
Declines her head, the lady of the land
That must be public, fain would be conceal'd,
Knowing how much she ought to all impart,
Yet much retaining with an artless art;
For there is beauty in the cowslip bell
That must be sought for ere it can be spied,
And her pure perfume must be known full well
Before its goodness can be testified;
And therefore do I give the flower to thee,
Thinking thee better than I know or see.

THE COWSLIP AND THE LARK.

My pretty lady cowslip! prim and shy,
Dress'd in the vernal garb of Roman bride,
I wish thee sometimes in a long road-side
My solitary dream to purify.
And thou, bold lark! thou shivering voice on high!
Invisible warbler of the blue expanse!
Why wilt thou not, my merry bird, advance,
And glad Winander with thy minstrelsy?
The fancy sweet of Persia feign'd the love
Of the voluptuous rose and nightingale.
And Kent flows on,—the merry lark above
And the meek cowslip bending in the vale;—
What if there be mysterious love between
The brave bird of the sky and floweret of the green.

ON A BUNCH OF COWSLIPS,

GROWN NEAR THE WRAY, AND PRESENTED TO THE AUTHOR BY A LADY.

THE CELANDINE AND THE DAISY.

I love the flowers that Nature gives away
With such a careless bounty: some would deem
She thought them baubles, things of no esteem,
Mere idle followers of unthrifty May.
See in the lane, where geese and donkeys stray,
The golden flower, the countless Celandine:
Though long o'erlook'd, it needs no praise of mine,
For 'tis one mightier poet's joy and theme.
See how the Daisies whiten all yon lea!
A thing so dear to poet and to child,
That when we see it on neglected wild,
We prize old Nature's generosity.
The Celandine one mighty bard may prize;
The Daisy no bard can monopolise.

THE SNOWDROP.

Yes, punctual to the time, thou 'rt here again,
As still thou art:—though frost or rain may vary,
And icicles blockade the rockbirds' aery,
Or sluggish snow lie heavy on the plain,
Yet thou, sweet child of hoary January,
Art here to harbinger the haggard train
Of vernal flowers, a duteous missionary.
Nor cold can blight, nor fog thy pureness stain.
Beneath the dripping eaves, or on the slope
Of cottage garden, whether mark'd or no,
Thy meek head bends in undistinguish'd row.
Blessings upon thee, gentle bud of hope!
And Nature bless the spot where thou dost grow—
Young life emerging from thy kindred snow!

THE GENTIANELLA.

Pretty stranger in our gardens,
We should beg thee thousand pardons,
Long forgotten, far too long,
Never mention'd yet in song.
Strange it is, that never ditty
Ever told thee thou wert pretty:
Rondo none, nor ritornella,
Praises thee, my Gentianella.
Very well I know thee, why
Thou art not like the cloudless sky,
Nor like the virgin's melting eye.
Poets seek in fields and trees
Quaint conceits and similes;
But thine azure is thine own,—
Nothing like it have I known;
Seems it not of upper earth:
Surely it must have its birth
In the darkness far below,
Where the dark-eyed sapphires grow?
Lovely votary of the sun,
Never wishing to be won
By a vain and mortal lover,
Shrinking closely into cover
When thy true love hath departed,
Patient, pure, and simple-hearted.
Like an exile doom'd to roam,
Not in foreign land at home,—
I will call thy azure hue
Brightest, firmest, truest blue.

THE LILY OF THE VALLEY.

Some flowers there are that rear their heads on high,
The gorgeous products of a burning sky,
That rush upon the eye with garish bloom,
And make the senses drunk with high perfume.
Not such art thou, sweet Lily of the Vale,
So lovely, small, and delicately pale,—
We might believe, if such fond faith were ours,
As sees humanity in trees and flowers,
That thou wert once a maiden, meek and good,
That pined away beneath her native wood
For very fear of her own loveliness,
And died of love she never would confess.

THE DANDELION.

Strange plants we bring from lands where Caffirs roam,
And great the traveller in botanic fame
That can inflict his queer and ugly name
On product of South Afric sands or loam,
Or on the flexile creeper that hath clomb
Up the tall stems of Polynesian palms;
And now with clusters, or with spikes, embalms
The sickly air beneath the glassy dome
In lordly garden. Haply time may be
When botanist from fire-born Owhyhee
Shall bear thee, milky mother of white down,
Back to his isle, a golden gift superb;—
Give name uncouth to diuretic herb,
And from the Dandelion reap renown.

TO THE PLANT “EVERLASTING.”

And is it thus? Shall roses fade,
And violets wither in the shade?
Must the tall lily lose her height,
And sickly pale usurp her white?
And shall the luscious woodbine shed
The quaint horns of each clustering head?
Must the sweet lady jessamine,
Pride of the cottar's porch, resign
The virgin pureness of her coronal,
And thou sustain no change at all?
The snowdrops, with their fairy bells,
Have but one chilly month of beauty;
Then the rank-set daffodils
Take the term of vernal duty:
And then in order due succeed
The cowslip, maiden of the mead,
And primrose of the “river's brim,”—
A village lassie, frank and free,
Unlike the cowslip, tall and slim—
A lady she of high degree,
Like a Roman bride in her bridal trim.
But these, and many more as gay,
As innocent and frail as they,
By Nature strewn in sweet disorder,
Or nicely prank'd in bed and border,
Babes of April, pets of May,
Like joys of childhood pass away.
Summer has a hotter grace,
Of darker leaf and broader face.
I never loved them much, and so
I'm well content to let them go.
And yet they tarry, trying ever—
Vainly trying to be—what?
To be young in vain endeavour,—
Venerable they are not.
Never mind!—we see the stems
Of summer flowers, all bare and seedy,
Like princes, stript of diadems,
In garden plots hirsute and weedy.
And when green Autumn, matron sage,
A lady of a “certain age,”
Majestic trails her sinuous train,
And clothes the yellow fields with grain,
She hath attendance meek of flowers,
As bold and purple, ripe and rosy,
As dowagers right red and cosy:
Grave matrons in the fairy hospitals,
Staid, stately, formal, bearded seneschals;
The painted pageantry of fairy bowers;
The darlings of a region far away,
Late-flowering heaths of Southern Africa,
Fuchsias from Chili, dahlias from Peru,
And strange varieties of motley hue,
Or gorgeous tints, that show what art can do.
But Winter comes,—
They perish; let them go!
There still are flowers, whose ancestors were born
Beneath the southern reign of Capricorn,
That deck old Winter under glassy frames.
I love them not, and do not know their names.
I better like the lichen's crackly scale,
The velvet moss, or verdant fox's tail.
But thus it seems that Nature ranges
In perpetuity of changes;
For every age she hath a symbol,
And tells it what it ought to be;
Youth, like Spring-time, light and nimble,
Evanescent in its glee;
Middle age, like woman wedded,
Should be Summer altogether;—
Only mark, it is not needed
There should be any rainy weather.
Autumn beauties, such there are,
Of forty years, or rather more,
But not so delicately fair
As twenty years ago they were,
Yet rich and ripe as Autumn's store.
And Winter—no, I will not tell
How age is Winter's parallel.
If like it be in anything,
'Tis nearest to successive Spring.
Spring, Summer, Autumn, with their train,
Pass away and come again;
For every spray and every flower,
When sever'd from the natal stem,
May yield its fragrance for an hour
In coronary diadem:
But having done its best, it dies—
Its sweetest odours are its parting sighs.
But what art thou, that bear'st a name
Synonymous with poet's fame;
Thou yellow, husky, arid thing;
Thou mere antipathy to Spring;
Not sweet to smell, nor fair to sight,
And useless as an anchorite,
Who feasted on continual fasting,
Art thou indeed “the Everlasting?”
Yes, so indeed, 'tis ever so;
'Tis right that God should only show
His goodness for a little while.
Brief is the being of a smile,
And pity's tears are quickly dry,
And all good things are born to die;
While things unholy, of small worth,
Endure a weary time on earth.
But think not, therefore, that the good
Is but the Giver's fitful mood.
He only lets us have a taste
Of heavenly good, and then in haste
Withdraws it, that we may be led
To seek it at the fountain-head;
While for the earth he leaves a feint,
The idol of the permanent,—
A something very like, indeed,
But not the same; a worthless weed
That hath the form, but not the power,
The juice, or fragrance of a flower.

THE FORGET-ME-NOT.