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Needwood Forest

Chapter 10: SONNET.
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About This Book

A long pastoral ode that celebrates a particular woodland through vivid natural description and mythic personification. It moves between close observation of trees, flowers, birds, and seasonal changes and imaginative scenes where nymphs, sylvan deities, and the Genius of the place animate the landscape. The poem praises rural leisure, hunting, and traditional country life while mourning legal enclosure and human encroachment that diminish the forest. Interwoven reflections consider beauty, fidelity, and the mingling of joy and loss, ending in elegiac remembrance.

SONNET.

Mundy, whose song hath taught the forest swain
To view fair Needwood thro’ the radiance clear
Of bright imagination, taught the tear
To glisten in his eye for other’s pain,
And own that taste and virtue are not vain,
How was thy pipe melodious wont to cheer
The wintry groves, when every leaf was sear,
And brighten summer with its artful strain!—
Say, by what meed shall Needwood court thy stay?
She unsuspecting twines in amorous care
Her favorite holly and her flower-bells gay,
To deck with modest hand her lover’s hair,—
Ah, do not thou her gentle hope betray,
And doom her tender bosom to despair!
B. B.