Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
France: Vols. IX–X. 1876–79.
La Rose de Sens
By Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925)R
By the gray cathedral door,
When the shadows of the morning
Fell athwart the marble floor;
And the marketwomen softly
Up the pillared aisles did pass,
With their caps as white as snowdrift,
On their way to early Mass.
Was alight with every hue
Which the darling flowers could muster,
As they trimmed their lamps anew!
’T was an early day in April
When I bought the precious thing;
But the beauty of the blossoms
Made a summer of the spring!
As the sunnier days came on,
Far from your native meadows,
In the valley of the Yonne;
From the turret, slim and dainty,
Which the wheeling swallows haunt;
From the mighty, massive minster,
With its slow Gregorian chant;
With its mosses overgrown;
From the yellow, perfumed wallflower,
Set in crannies of the stone;
From the fragments of the ramparts,
Half of Rome and half of Gaul,
Which beat back the foes of Clovis
From their vast embattled wall;
In the broad, unburdened stream,
Where the English exile, Thomas,
May have dreamed prophetic dream
Of those distant Kentish meadows,
Where, at scarce a later day,
His own tomb should be the altar,
Where half Europe flocked to pray.
On the hills above the Seine,
Where many dainty roses
Drink their fill of summer rain;
But whatever be their beauty
Or how rare soe’er they be,
There ’s not a rose among them
That can tell your tale to me!