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From a London garden cover

From a London garden

Chapter 22: A FORLORN HOPE
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About This Book

A collected series of lyrical poems moves between urban and rural imagery to reflect on love, mortality, time, memory, and moral growth. The poet uses concise, imagistic language and varied meters to meditate on human experience: longing and loss, pride and humility, the rhythms of city life and quiet country scenes, the passage of days and seasons, death and consolation. Voices range from personal confession to philosophical observation, with elegiac tones, religious reflection, and celebration of steadfastness. Recurring motifs—light and shadow, dawn and evening, gardens and streets—bind individual pieces into a contemplative portrait of inner life amid modern surroundings.

A FORLORN HOPE

Lest you should feel
That I am all unworthy of your grace,
I set me in your presence to reveal
Whate’er of good within my heart hath place.
Lest you should then
Love me too well at first, and then despise—
Finding I am but weak as other men—
I do not hide my folly from your eyes.
Mask’d with no sham,
When thus my strivings and my sins you see,
Although you cannot love the man I am,
You yet may love the man I strive to be.