Laurella and other poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

I have seen the gifts that brown Vertumnus brought
To coy Pomona, from the hot noontide
Sheltering within her bower; when he sought
With all his wealth to win her for his bride.
The lusty god unawares came to her side,
And laughing as half-drowsed his love he caught,
Showered in her lap his pride
Of fruitage ripe from orchard boughs down-raught.

II.

Upon his head he steadied a huge bowl,
Forged out of gold by Vulcan, ivory-rimmed,
Craftily carven with fantastic scroll
Of legends olden and devices quaint,
And sumptuously o'erbrimmed
With its heapéd load—bees humming round it stole
The hoarded sweets, and butterflies, half-faint
For very bliss, fed, with their gorgeous wings
Wide-waving to the sun with tremulous flutterings.

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III.

Thence first he flung pink, delicate-fleshed strawberries;
And store of cool-juiced cherries
That freshen the parched lips of hot July;
And currants red and white,
Flashing in silvery light
Like rubied carcanets in leafy canopy;
With Ethiop mulberries of giant size,
And musky amberous and red-blooded raspberries.

IV.

Then, as she smiled for wonder, he outpoured
All fruitful Autumn's hoard:
Lush golden apricots that, tasted, bring
Memories of cowslipped Spring;
Plump sun-split figs, shot with immingling shades—
Olive and dusky violet, cloying-sweet;
The burden of white-armed Sicilian maids
In their brown baskets, where no siroc's heat
Can blast the succulent strength of verdurous leaves,
Five-cleft, and waving in the cool sea-wind
With changing shadows flung on walls and eaves
And bloomy, satin-skinned,
And luscious-melting plums, purple and green,
Bursting with ripeness, dropping at a touch
From their age-wrinkled boughs—as they had been
With their own treasures weighted overmuch.

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V.

And still in her o'erflowing lap he poured
All fruitful Autumn's hoard;
Flushed nectarines, honey-hearted, morsels meet
To recompense the earth-doomed Lord of song
For lost Olympian banquets; and with these,
Peaches he had watched, the sultry summer long,
Bask on hot garden walls, whereto their trees
Clung with their ripening load, sucking each sweet
Of the boon soil; peaches, their downy cheeks
Ablush with glowing crimson—luxuries
Of fragrant richness, kept from prying beaks;
Peaches with summer in their nectarous juice,
And stored-up sunshine, and the soul of the rose
In their ambrosial pulp! In heaps profuse
He strewed anon the bower of her repose
With royal bunches of fresh-blooméd grapes,
Deep-purpled, luminous emerald, lustrous black,
Tasting of vintage where warm southern capes
Stretch with their vines to baked cliffs, hurling back
In creaming foam the surge of opal seas—
Full of old autumn's sunniest-hearted wine,
His secret-hoarded, deep deliciousness.
Lucid magnificent clusters huge as these
Young Bacchus crushed with infant hands divine—
Soft shapes of reddening vine-leaves, swayed by a breeze,
Down-wavering on wide lips and fingers' stress.

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VI.

And next he showed her, swelling in their pride,
Great pine-apples, with leafy diadems
Royally crowned, and clad in kingly mail
Of scaléd bronze; smelling of forests wide
Where magian cedars, from their opulent stems
Exuding balmy gums, lend the soft gale
Circean incense—borne for many a mile,
To lure tossed sailors to some charméd isle.

VII.

Then rolled forth melons, green or ruddy-fleshed,
Cool from sunned garden corners—every rind
Split to display its dragon-toothéd seeds;
With each well-flavoured kind
Of fragrant apple, breezily rocked and riped,
Beneath the guard of uncouth Termini,
In orchards old amid the flowery meads.
The earliest rime had touched maturingly
The vintage of their hearts, and left them—striped
Carnation-wise, red-cheeked, or shining yellow—
Filled with fresh oxymel, frostily keen.
Them followed odorous pears, sere-hued and mellow,
Which seasoning hung, great-wombed, till they had seen
August's last sultriness beloved by bees,
Drinking the still delicious melancholy
Of the declining year even to the lees;

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Till they might make sweet dreams not vanished wholly,
Love-cherished sorrows, and long-lost delights,
In seldom-opening cells of memory
Dimly to live again. What next invites?
Lo! clusters of brown filberts, snatched with glee
By truant children in the squirrel's haunt,
For their creamy kernels. On her lap fell last
The fruit hell-tasted of Proserpina—
Blood-stained pomegranates, plucked from boughs that flaunt
Their scarlet flowers, though summer heats be past.
This sumptuous vision on a day I saw.