| |
| THE WREATH that star-crowned Shelley gave | |
| Is lying on thy Roman grave, | |
| Yet on its turf young April sets | |
| Her store of slender violets; | |
| Though all the Gods their garlands shower, | 5 |
| I too may bring one purple flower. | |
| Alas! what blossom shall I bring, | |
| That opens in my Northern spring? | |
| The garden beds have all run wild, | |
| So trim when I was yet a child; | 10 |
| Flat plantains and unseemly stalks | |
| Have crept across the gravel walks; | |
| The vines are dead, long, long ago, | |
| The almond buds no longer blow. | |
| No more upon its mound I see | 15 |
| The azure, plume-bound fleur-de-lis; | |
| Where once the tulips used to show, | |
| In straggling tufts the pansies grow; | |
| The grass has quenched my white-rayed gem, | |
| The flowering “Star of Bethlehem,” | 20 |
| Though its long blade of glossy green | |
| And pallid stripe may still be seen. | |
| Nature, who trends her nobles down, | |
| And gives their birthright to the clown, | |
| Has sown her base-born weedy things | 25 |
| Above the garden’s queens and kings. | |
| Yet one sweet flower of ancient race | |
| Springs in the old familiar place. | |
| When snows were melting down the vale, | |
| And Earth unlaced her icy mail, | 30 |
| And March his stormy trumpet blew, | |
| And tender green came peeping through, | |
| I loved the earliest one to seek | |
| That broke the soil with emerald beak, | |
| And watch the trembling bells so blue | 35 |
| Spread on the column as it grew. | |
| Meek child of earth! thou wilt not shame | |
| The sweet, dead poet’s holy name; | |
| The God of music gave thee birth, | |
| Called from the crimson-spotted earth, | 40 |
| Where, sobbing his young life away, | |
| His own fair Hyacinthus lay. | |
| The hyacinth my garden gave | |
| Shall lie upon that Roman grave! | |
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