To My Class: On Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in Sickness
From Wikisource
| To My Class: On Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in Sickness by |
| Sidney Lanier composed this sonnet in Baltimore, Maryland at Christmas, 1880, just a few weeks before he passed away. His class in English Literature, composed of young girls, had been studying Chaucer’s The Knighte’s Tale when he was stricken with illness. His sonnet “On Violet’s Wafers, Sent Me When I Was Ill” was similarly conceived for a member of that same class. |
If spicy-fringed pinks that blush and pale
With passions of perfume, —if violets blue
That hint of heaven with odor more than hue, —
If perfect roses, each a holy Grail
Wherefrom the blood of beauty doth exhale
Grave raptures round, —if leaves of green as new
As those fresh chaplets wove in dawn and dew
By Emily when down the Athenian vale
She paced, to do observance to the May,
Nor dreamed of Arcite nor of Palamon, —
If fruits that riped in some more riotous play
Of wind and beam that stirs our temperate sun, —
If these the products be of love and pain,
Oft may I suffer, and you love, again.
