The lily and the rose have books
Devoted to their lovely looks,
And wit has fallen in vital showers
Through England's most miraculous hours
To keep them fresh a thousand years.
The immortal library can show
The violet's well-thumbed folio
Stained tenderly by girls in tears.
The shelf where Genius stands in view
Has brier and daffodil and rue
And love-lies-bleeding; but not you,
Sweetwilliam.
Thus, if I seek the classic line
For marybuds, 'tis, Shakespeare, thine!
And ever is the primrose born
'Neath Goldsmith's overhanging thorn.
In Herrick's breastknot I can see
The apple-blossom, fresh and fair
As when he plucked and put it there,
Heedless of Time's anthology.
So flower by flower comes into view
Kept fadeless by the Olympian dew
For startled eyes; and yet not you,
Sweetwilliam.
Though gods of song have let you be,
Bloom in my little book for me.
Unwont to stoop or lean, you show
An undefeated heart, and grow
As pluckily as cedars. Heat
And cold, and winds that make
Tumbledown sallies, cannot shake
Your resolution to be sweet.
Then take this song, be it born to die
Ere yet the unwedded butterfly
Has glimpsed a darling in the sky,
Sweetwilliam!
Norman Gale
ROSE-GERANIUM
A pungent spray of rose-geranium—
A breath of the old life.
It brings up the little five-room cottage where I was born,
And where I grew through a smiling childhood.
The white-bearded grandfather sits in his mended rocking-chair,
His eyes far off, crooning "The Sweet By and By,"
Marked with the tapping of his toe upon the weathered porch-floor,
While the sunshine drizzles through the great oaks.
And there is my grandmother's kneeling figure,
Turning over the rich black earth with her trowel;
And the kind wrinkles on her face, as she says:
"Didn't the pansies do finely this year, Clem?
And the scarlet verbenas, and the larkspurs,
And the row of flaming salvia....
Those roses ... they're Maréchal Niels ... my favorites.
And little grandson, smell this spray of rose-geranium—
Just think, when grandmother was a little tiny girl
Her grandmother grew them in her yard!"
Clement Wood