Poems

Chapter 22: I praise the tender flower

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About This Book

A selection of lyrical poems gathered from several short series, offering quiet meditations on memory, love, and the passing seasons. Many pieces place a reflective speaker beside rivers, hills, and gardens, using precise pastoral detail to evoke mood and recollection. Occasional mythic or devotional images and poems of courtly wooing broaden the emotional range, while elegiac pieces consider loss and aging. The language favors compact, formally patterned lyrics—rhyme, meter, musical diction—to produce concentrated, often wistful impressions.

I praise the tender flower,

That on a mournful day

Bloomed in my garden bower

And made the winter gay.

Its loveliness contented

My heart tormented.

I praise the gentle maid

Whose happy voice and smile

To confidence betrayed

My doleful heart awhile:

And gave my spirit deploring

Fresh wings for soaring.

The maid for very fear

Of love I durst not tell:

The rose could never hear,

Though I bespake her well:

So in my song I bind them

For all to find them.