Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages

by Unknown

With all appliances and means to boot,

Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Henry IV. Part ii.

[30].

For many years I read this poem as if the accents in the first line of each stanza fell on the first and third word—the two "I's." It was stupid of me, for clearly the accent should fall (lightly) on the second syllable of the "remembers." Apart from the accents or stresses in a line of verse, there is the rise and fall of the voice, a kind of tune in the saying of it. If the right tune is not caught, then the difference is as much as if one sniffed a wallflower and it smelt like African mimosa. And to me, as to hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, this poem is as familiar, long-endeared and refreshing as wallflower, Sweet William, or Old Man. This is the second or third time I have made remarks about the rhythm, lilt or tune of a poem; and it won't be the last. May I be forgiven, for as Chaucer wrote to his small son Louis when he was sharing with him his love of astronomy: "Soothly me seemeth betre to writen unto a child twice a good sentence, then he forget it ones." As for his elders, even thrice may be short commons.

"Those Flowers made of Light." (line 12)

Hold up a flower between eye and sun, or even candle-flame, and it seems little but its own waxen hue and colour. Moonlight is too pale; the petals remain opaque. In the moon's light, indeed, blueness is scarcely distinguishable from shadowiness; red darkens but yellow pales, and the fairest flowers of all wake in her beams—jasmine, convolvulus, evening-primrose—as if they not only shared her radiance but returned a glowwormlike fuminess of their own.

Once, long before I came to Thrae, having plucked for my mother a few convolvulus flowers, I remember when I was just about to give them into her hand I discovered that the beautiful cups of delight had enwreathed themselves together, and had returned as it were to the bud, never to reopen. I was but a child, and this odd little disappointment was so extreme that I burst out crying.