His love of nature, his passion for flowers and the music of nature find continued and ecstatic expression.
"Sweet is the swallow twittering on the eaves."
Everything appeals to him, "the heavy lowing cattle stretching their huge and dripping mouths across the farmyard gate," the mower whetting his scythe, the milkmaid carolling blithely as she trips along.
"Sweet are the hips upon the Kentish leas,
And sweet the wind that lifts the new-mown hay,
And sweet the fretful swarms of grumbling bees
That round and round the linden blossoms play;
And sweet the heifer breathing on the stall
And the green bursting figs that hang upon the red-brick wall."
No matter that he mixes up the seasons somewhat and that having sung of bursting figs he refers, in the next line, to the cuckoo mocking the spring—"when the last violet loiters by the well"—the poem is still a pastoral breathing its fresh flower-filled atmosphere of the English countryside. Wilde is, however, saturated with classical lore and (though on some minds the fantasy may jar) he introduces Daphnus and Linus, Syrinx and Cytheræa. But he is faithful to his English land, he talks of roses which "all day long in vales Æolian a lad might seek for" and which "overgrows our hedges like a wanton courtesan, unthrifty of its beauty," a real Shakespearean touch. "Many an unsung elegy," he tells us, "Sleeps in the reeds that fringe our winding Thames." He peoples the whole countryside with faun and nymph—
"Some Mænad girl with vine leaves on her breast
Will filch their beech-nuts from the sleeping Pans,
So softly that the little nested thrush
Will never wake, and then will shrilly laugh and leap will rush
Down the green valley where the fallen dew
Lies thick beneath the elm and count her store,
Till the brown Satyrs in a jolly crew
Trample the loosetrife down along the shore,
And where their horned master sits in state
Bring strawberries and bloomy plums upon a wicker crate."
And yet the religious influence still makes itself felt.
"Why must I behold [he exclaims]
The wan white face of that deserted Christ
Whose bleeding hands my hands did once enfold?"
but it is only momentary, and once more he sports with the sylvan gods and goddesses till
"The heron passes homeward from the mere,
The blue mist creeps among the shivering trees,
Gold world by world the silent stars appear
And like a blossom blows—before the breeze
A white moon drifts across the shimmering sky."