| I |
“Spring-flowers”! While you still delay to take
Your leave of Town,
Our elmtree’s ruddy-hearted blossom-flake
Is fluttering down. |
| |
| II |
Be truer to your promise. There! I heard
Our cuckoo call.
Be needle to the magnet of your word,
Nor wait, till all |
| |
| III |
Our vernal bloom from every vale and plain
And garden pass,
And all the gold from each laburnum chain
Drop to the grass. |
| |
| IV |
Is memory with your Marian gone to rest,
Dead with the dead?
For ere she left us, when we met, you prest
My hand, and said |
| |
| V |
“I come with your spring-flowers.” You came not, friend;
My birds would sing,
You heard not. Take then this spring-flower I send,
This song of spring, |
| |
| VI |
Found yesterday—forgotten mine own rhyme
By mine old self,
As I shall be forgotten by old Time,
Laid on the shelf— |
| |
| VII |
A rhyme that flower’d betwixt the whitening sloe
And kingcup blaze,
And more than half a hundred years ago,
In rick-fire days, |
| |
| VIII |
When Dives loathed the times, and paced his land
In fear of worse,
And sanguine Lazarus felt a vacant hand
Fill with his purse. |
| |
| IX |
For lowly minds were madden’d to the height
By tonguester tricks,
And once—I well remember that red night
When thirty ricks, |
| |
| X |
All flaming, made an English homestead Hell—
These hands of mine
Have helpt to pass a bucket from the well
Along the line, |
| |
| XI |
When this bare dome had not begun to gleam
Thro’ youthful curls,
And you were then a lover’s fairy dream,
His girl of girls; |
| |
| XII |
And you, that now are lonely, and with Grief
Sit face to face,
Might find a flickering glimmer of relief
In change of place. |
| |
| XIII |
What use to brood? this life of mingled pains
And joys to me,
Despite of every Faith and Creed, remains
The Mystery. |
| |
| XIV |
Let golden youth bewail the friend, the wife,
For ever gone.
He dreams of that long walk thro’ desert life
Without the one. |
| |
| XV |
The silver year should cease to mourn and sigh—
Not long to wait—
So close are we, dear Mary, you and I
To that dim gate. |
| |
| XVI |
Take, read! and be the faults your Poet makes
Or many or few,
He rests content, if his young music wakes
A wish in you |
| |
| XVII |
To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm
Of sound and smoke,
For his clear heaven, and these few lanes of elm
And whispering oak. |
TO W. G. WARD