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Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth

Chapter 29: THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS.
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About This Book

A varied collection of lyrics and sonnets that celebrates the sensory life of earth while probing larger moral and philosophical questions. Poems evoke woodlands, meadows, and pastoral music, employ classical and mythic allusion, and meditate on love, change, and the tension between wild impulse and cultivated wisdom. Ballads and shorter lyrics supply narrative motion and vivid imagery; sonnets compress reflective argument about time, art, and the self. The overall tone moves between exuberant celebration and guarded instruction, using musical diction and dense metaphor to connect natural perception with human feeling and ethical awareness.

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS.

That Garden of sedate Philosophy
Once flourished, fenced from passion and mishap,
A shining spot upon a shaggy map;
Where mind and body, in fair junction free,
Luted their joyful concord; like the tree
From root to flowering twigs a flowing sap.
Clear Wisdom found in tended Nature’s lap,
Of gentlemen the happy nursery.
That Garden would on light supremest verge,
Were the long drawing of an equal breath
Healthful for Wisdom’s head, her heart, her aims.
Our world which for its Babels wants a scourge,
And for its wilds a husbandman, acclaims
The crucifix that came of Nazareth.