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From a London garden cover

From a London garden

Chapter 8: GROWTH
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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.

GROWTH

Blow, winds, your rage but shakes the tree
And roots it surer in its place!
Scatter your rain, ye clouds, and free
The buds that wait your frowning grace!
Roll down, O river, to the sea,
And widen in your onward race!
Peace through a sunny span may keep
His garden in some quiet glen,
Whilst others sow for him, and reap,
And tend his flocks on moor and fen:
The flowers of Peace are death and sleep;
The strife of living makes us men.
Ah, joy it is to win the goal
By tireless work and dauntless will,
Yet may the life rise orbed and whole
From clouded hopes, and loss, and ill:
Our baffled toils upbuild the soul,
And failure so is victory still.