Poem by Edmund Clarence Stedman

Heliotrope

  I walk in the morning twilight,
    Along a garden-slope,
  To the shield of moss encircling
    My beautiful Heliotrope.

  O sweetest of all the flowerets
    That bloom where angels tread!
  But never such marvellous odor
    From heliotrope was shed,

  As the passionate exhalation,
    The dew of celestial wine,
  That floats in tremulous languor
    Around this darling of mine.

  For, only yester-even,
    I saw the dearest scene!
  I heard the delicate footfall,
    The step of my love, my queen.

  Along the walk she glided:
    I made no sound nor sign,
  But ever, at the turning
    Of her star-white neck divine,

  I shrunk in the shade of the cypress,
    And crouched in the swooning grass,
  Like some Arcadian shepherd
    To see an Oread pass.

  But when she came to the border
    At the end of the garden-slope,
  She bent, like a rose-tree, over
    That beautiful Heliotrope.

  The cloud of its subtile fragrance
    Entwined her in its wreath,
  And all the while commingled
    With the incense of her breath.

  And so she glistened onward,
    Far down the long parterre,
  Beside the statue of Hesper,
    And a hundred times more fair.

  But ah! her breath had added
    The perfume that I find
  In this, the sweetest of flowerets,
    And the paragon of its kind.

  I drink deep draughts of its nectar;
    I faint with love and hope!
  Oh, what did she whisper to you,
    My beautiful Heliotrope?

1. W. W.
2. Too Late
3. Voice of the Western Wind
4. Penelope
5. The Singer

Henry Abbey Heliotrope ("Let my soul and thine commune")

Print

1608 Views

Last Poems

To Russian version