Poem by Louise Imogen Guiney

The Japanese Anemone

ALL summer the breath of the roses around
Exhales with a delicate, passionate sound;
And when from a trellis, in holiday places,
They croon and cajole, with their slumberous faces,
A lad in the lane must slacken his paces.

Fragrance of these is a voice in a bower:
But low by the wall is my odorless flower,
So pure, so controlled, not a fume is above her,
That poet or bee should delay there and hover;
For she is a silence, and therefore I love her.

And never a mortal by morn or midnight
Is called to her hid little house of delight;
And she keeps from the wind, on his pillages olden,
Upon a true stalk in rough weather upholden,
Her winter-white gourd with the hollow moon-golden.

While ardors of roses contend and increase,
Methinks she has found how noble is peace,
Like a spirit besought from the world to dissever,
Not absent to men, tho’ resumed by the Giver,
And dead long ago, being lovely for ever.

1. When on the Marge of Evening
2. Heathenesse
3. A Talisman
4. Sherman: “An Horatian Ode”
5. Of Joan’s Youth

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