The woven picture; ’tis a woman’s skill
Indeed; but nothing baffled me, so, ill
Or well, the work is finished. Say, men feed
On songs I sing, and therefore bask the bees
On my flower’s breast as on a platform broad:
But, as the flower’s concern is not for these
But solely for the sun, so men applaud
In vain this Rudel, he not looking here
But to the East—the East! Go, say this, Pilgrim dear!
This poem was first published in “Bells and Pomegranates” under the head of “Queen Worship.” How exquisite the plea of the unnoticed Flower, with no pretence to vie with the Mountain in its claim upon the Sun’s attention, except this, that the great unchanging Mountain is “vainly favoured,” while the Flower yields itself up in ceaseless and self-forgetting devotion to an imitation, however feeble and foolish, of the great Sun Life.