Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. (1878–1962). Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1920.

Tiger Lily

GRAY are the gardens of our Celtic lands,

Dreaming and gray,

Tended by the devotion of pale hands,

On barren crags, or by disastrous sands,

That night and day

Are drenched with bitter spray.

There rosemary and thyme are plentiful,

Larkspur that lovers cull,

Love-in-the-mist that is most sorrowful.

Flowers so wistful that our teardrops start.…

Scarcely one understands that regal, rare,

Bravely the tiger lily blossoms there,

Bravely apart.

Our gardens are enamored of the spring,

Of silver rain,

The cloudy green of buds slow-burgeoning,

The sorrow of last apple blooms that cling

And are not fain

To yield their fruit again.

We do not long for tropic pageantry,

Yet surge with love to see

The tiger lily’s muted ecstasy.

Watered by mist and lashed by wind-blown rime,

She is no alien thing; but vivid, free,

She has no heed for paler rosemary,

Larkspur or thyme.

It is in vain they worship her who knows

Pity nor pride.

Their petals whirl down every wind that goes

South to the palms or northward to the snows,

Mourning they died

So distant from her side.

But the brave tiger lily blossoms on,

Never to be undone

Till the last rosemary and thyme are gone.

Tattered by autumn storms, she will not fling

Herself to sullen foes. The winter rain

Alone can beat her down, to bloom again

Spring after spring.

Ainslee’s Magazine