VIOLETS
I had not thought of violets of late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
The thoughts of violets meant florists’ shops,
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;
And garish lights, and mincing little fops,
And cabarets and songs, and deadening wine.
So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,
I had forgot wide fields and clear brown streams;
The perfect loveliness that God has made—
Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams
And now unwittingly, you’ve made me dream
Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam.
It needs not that a poet write an epic to prove himself chosen of the muse. The winds of time may blow into oblivion all but five lines of an opus magnum, in which five lines alone was the laborious author a poet. Wise is the poet who writes but the five lines, as here:
SUNSET
Since Poets have told of sunset,
What is left for me to tell?
I can only say that I saw the day
Press crimson lips to the horizon gray,
And kiss the earth farewell.
Mary Effie Lee.
The theme may be as old as man and as common as humanity yet it can be made to be felt as poetic by one who has the magic gift, as here:
LONELINESS
I cannot make my thoughts stay home;
I cannot close their door;
And, oh, that I might shut them in,
And they go out no more!
For they go out, with wistful eyes,
And search the whole world through;
Just hoping, in their wandering,
To catch a glimpse of you!
Winifred Virginia Jordan.
One’s find may be in The Poet’s Ingle of a newspaper, where an unknown name is attached to verses that have the charm which Longfellow found in the simple and heartfelt lays of the humbler poet. From such a poem, entitled To My Grandmother, by Mae Smith Johnson, I take two stanzas, the first two as beautiful as the theme evoked: