Poems of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) from Flowers of Loveliness, 1838/The Hyacinth
HYACINTH
|
From The New Yorker, 23rd December 1837. Page 630
THE HYACINTH.
Where is the bee its sweetest music bringing?
The music living in its busy wings;
Like the small fountain's low, perpetual singing,
Counting the quiet hours that noon-tide brings?
It is the Hyacinth, whose sweet bells stooping,
Bend with the odours[1] heavy in their cells;
Amid the shadows of their fragrant drooping,
Memory, that is itself a shadow, dwells.
Ah! do not wreathe it 'mid the golden tresses
That mock the sunshine on that childish head;
Bind there the meadow flowers the wind caresses,
Around a thousand careless blossoms shed:
But not the Hyacinth, whose purple sadness
To an old world long since gone by appeals;
What hath the child's one hour of eager gladness
To do with all that haunted flower reveals?
Life gave its first deep colour[2] to that blossom;
Life, in an evil hour untimely shed;
Down to the earth inclines its fragrant bosom,
As heavy with the memory of the dead.
Deep in the twilight depths of those dark flowers
Are mystic characters amid them furled;
Are they the language of ancestral hours,—
The records of a younger, lovelier world?
What is the secret written in their numbers,
Strange as the figures on Egyptian shrines?
What marvel of the ancient earth now slumbers
In the obscurity of those dim times[3]?
Little we know the secrets that surround us,
And much has vanished from our later day;
Mature with many a mystery has bound us,
And much of our old love has passed away.
No ancient voices, in the dim woods crying
Reveal the hidden world—no prophet's eye
Asks the foreseeing stars for their replying,
And reads the Future in the midnight sky.
Many the lovely things which[4] now are banished
From our harsh path—the actual and the cold;
The angel and the spirit, each are vanished;
Where are the beautiful that were of old?
Vain, though so lovely, was this old believing,
But not thus vain the faith that gave it birth;
It was the beauty of the far-off—leaving
The presence of the spiritual on earth.L. E. L.
Flowers of Loveliness for 1838.