Flowers and Gardens

O Rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

Knowst thou the land where the lemon trees bloom, 4 Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket’s gloom, Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows, And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose?

Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.

Her modest looks the cottage might adorn, Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Die of a rose in aromatic pain?

Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade, Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade: Where’er you tread, the blushing flow’rs shall rise, And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.

God the first garden made, and the first city.

A wilderness of sweets.

Not that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world.

Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose.

And add to these retired Leisure, That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.

The firstling of the infant year.

Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose; For in your beauty’s orient deep These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie.

I got me flowers to strew Thy way, I got me boughs off many a tree: But Thou wast up by break of day, And brought’st Thy sweets along with Thee.

The Alphabet Of flowers.

Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty.

Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ the sun, And with him rises weeping: these are flowers Of middle summer, and I think they are given To men of middle age.

For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep Seeming and savor all the winter long.

Lay her i’ the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring!

I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine: There sleeps Titania some time of the night, Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight; And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin, Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.

And the imperial votaress passed on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free. Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound, And maidens call it, Love-in-idleness.

I must go seek some dew drops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.