Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 13: My Garden.

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About This Book

A collection of verse that shifts between brisk depictions of modern life—motor races and city heat—and intimate lyrical sonnets exploring love, memory, and devotional longing. Classical and medieval references recur alongside pagan pastoral fantasies that imagine escape to woodland Hesperides, while formal experiments include songs, sonnets, ballades, rondeaux and a pantoum. A seasonal sequence maps moods across spring to winter, and a concluding suite treats mortality through elegy and dark humor. The poems balance energetic narrative scenes with reflective, sometimes elegiac meditations on desire, nature, and death.

My Garden.

With a copy of “Sonnets of this Century.”

THIS little book, a Garden where the bloom

And fragrance of an hundred years are pent,

To thee, dear girl, at Christmas-tide is sent

By one who breathes with love the sweet perfume

Of such frail flowers. Let aye the world consume

Itself with toil and labour—such are all

Without the bounds of this my garden-wall,

And I, in light, feel not nor heed their gloom.

Come thou into my Garden! Let me show

Thee all the treasures that do lend it grace,

These goodly Sonnets, standing in a row

To tell of joy, tears, love,—life’s madrigal;

And, mistress of the pure enchanted place,

Be thou the fairest Flower among them all!...