Verses and Sonnets

Chapter 12: HER GIFT IN A GARDEN.

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About This Book

This collection assembles sonnets, short lyrics, grotesques and epigrams that shift between playful satire and serious meditation. Poems evoke nocturnal reverie, pastoral songs, seasonal sonnets for each month, and compact narrative sketches, while recurring themes include youth and ageing, love and honour, music and faith, mortality and urban poverty. Formal variety—from polished sonnet sequences to biting epigrams—allows intimate love poems to sit beside comic portraits and moral reflections, producing a compact, varied lyrical volume that alternates tenderness, irony, and moral urgency across domestic, religious, and public scenes.

HER GIFT IN A GARDEN.

Not for the luckless buds our roots may bear,

Now quite in bloom, now seared and cankered lying,

Will I entreat you, lest they should compare

My sad mortality with the fall of flowers;

But hold with me your chaste communion rare,

And touch with life this mortal case of ours.

For you were born beyond the power of dying:

I die as bounded things die everywhere.

You’re full companionship, I’m silence lonely;

You’re stuff, I’m void; you’re living, I’m decay.

I fall, I think, to twilight ending only,

You lift, I know, to never-ending day.

And knowing living gift was life for me,

In narrow room of rhyme, I fixed it certainly.