Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown!
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the roses blown.
For a breeze of morning moves,
And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves,
...
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep, square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses...
From “An Houre’s Recreation in Musicke,” 1606
THERE is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies blow;
A heavenly paradise is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits do grow;
There cherries grow that none may buy,
Till cherry-ripe themselves do cry.
Those cherries fairly do enclose
Of orient pearl a double row,...
Keen was the air, the sky was very light,
Soft with shed snow my garden was, and white,
And, walking there, I heard upon the night
Sudden sound of little voices,
Just the prettiest of noises.
It was the strangest, subtlest, sweetest sound,
It seemed above me, seemed upon the ground,
Then swiftly seemed to eddy round and round,...
I.
Beware of building! I intended
Rough logs and thatch, and thus it ended.
II.
Instead of a pound or two, spending a mint
Must serve me at least, I believe, with a hint,
That building and building a man may be driven
At last out of doors, and have no house to live in....
Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of...
I haven't told my garden yet —
Lest that should conquer me.
I haven't quite the strength now
To break it to the Bee —
I will not name it in the street
For shops would stare at me —
That one so shy — so ignorant
Should have the face to die.
The hillsides must not know...
My Garden — like the Beach —
Denotes there be — a Sea —
That's Summer —
Such as These — the Pearls
She fetches — such as Me
New feet within my garden go,
New fingers stir the sod ;
A troubadour upon the elm
Betrays the solitude.
New children play upon the green,
New weary sleep below ;
And still the pensive spring returns,
And...
As one who, long in thickets and in brakes
Entangled, winds now this way and now that
His devious course uncertain, seeking home;
Or, having long in miry ways been foil'd,
And sore discomfited, from slough to slough
Plunging, and half despairing of escape;
If chance at length he finds a greensward smooth...
