A little marsh-plant, yellow green, | |
And pricked at lip with tender red. | |
Tread close, and either way you tread | |
Some faint black water jets between | |
Lest you should bruise the curious head. | |
A live thing maybe; who shall know? | |
The summer knows and suffers it; | |
For the cool moss is thick and sweet | |
Each side, and saves the blossom so | |
10 | That it lives out the long June heat. |
The deep scent of the heather burns | |
About it; breathless though it be, | |
Bow down and worship; more than we | |
Is the least flower whose life returns, | |
Least weed renascent in the sea. | |
We are vexed and cumbered in earth’s sight | |
With wants, with many memories; | |
These see their mother what she is, | |
Glad-growing, till August leave more bright | |
20 | The apple-coloured cranberries. |
Wind blows and bleaches the strong grass, | |
Blown all one way to shelter it | |
From trample of strayed kine, with feet | |
Felt heavier than the moorhen was, | |
Strayed up past patches of wild wheat. | |
You call it sundew: how it grows, | |
30 | If with its colour it have breath, |
If life taste sweet to it, if death | |
Pain its soft petal, no man knows: | |
Man has no sight or sense that saith. | |
My sundew, grown of gentle days, | |
In these green miles the spring begun | |
Thy growth ere April had half done | |
With the soft secret of her ways | |
Or June made ready for the sun. | |
O red-lipped mouth of marsh-flower, | |
I have a secret halved with thee. | |
The name that is love’s name to me | |
Thou knowest, and the face of her | |
40 | Who is my festival to see. |
The hard sun, as thy petals knew, | |
Coloured the heavy moss-water: | |
Thou wert not worth green midsummer | |
Nor fit to live to August blue, | |
O sundew, not remembering her. |