The sensitive plant

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

For the present the genius of civilisation, numerating duration into hours and years and centuries for man’s convenience, overrides the slow-crawling tortoise of Time: but it will not always be so; and earth will come at last to be altogether rid of us and that superfluous “sense of beauty” which has so long yoked her back, and hedged her wastes and furrowed her fields.

Laurence Housman.

THE SENSITIVE PLANT

FIRST PART

I

A sensitive plant in a garden grew,

And the young winds fed it with silver dew,