From a London garden

Chapter 28: THE GUEST

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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.

THE GUEST

Time runs so swiftly when the heart is glad,

Let me be sometimes sad,

Lest the all-happy noon

Flash into eve and fade, and I grow old too soon.

Let me be sometimes sad that life may gain

Sweetness from sorrow’s rain,

Nor bask till day be done,

A scentless blossom, shrivelling in a cloudless sun.

For broken hearts to riper wisdom wake

Than hearts that never break,

And from their anguish flows

The joy that tearless laughter seeks but never knows.

Since sorrows are life’s winters, in our primes

If we be sad sometimes,

At last, one winter more,

Age comes but as a guest that stayed with us before.

The heart renews its youth when griefs are past,

And age so comes, at last,

Like some remembered pain

That shall but come and go, and leave us young again.