Poems by Hartley Coleridge :: :: University of Virginia Library

There is a little and a pretty flower,
That you may find in many a garden plot;
Yet wild it is, and grows amid the stour
Of public roads, as in close-wattled bower:
Its name in English is, Forget-me-not.

Sweet was the fancy of those antique ages
That put a heart in every stirring leaf,
Writing deep morals upon Nature's pages,
Turning sweet flowers into deathless sages,
To calm our joy and sanctify our grief.

And gladly would I know the man or child,
But no!—it surely was a pensive girl
That gave so sweet a name to floweret wild,
A harmless innocent, and unbeguiled,
To whom a flower is precious as a pearl.

111

Fain would I know, and yet I can but guess,
How the blue floweret won a name so sweet.
Did some fond mother, bending down to bless
Her sailing son, with last and fond caress,
Give the small plant to guard him through the fleet?

Did a kind maid, that through her lover all
By which a maid would fain belovèd be,
Leaning against a ruin'd abbey wall,
Make of the flower an am'rous coronal,
That still should breathe and whisper, “Think of me?”

But were I good and holy as a saint,
Or hermit dweller in secluded grot,
If e'er the soul in hope and love were faint,
Then, like an antidote to mortal taint,
I'd give the pretty flower Forget-me-not.