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Home  »  Parnassus  »  George Herbert (1593–1633)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, comp. (1803–1882). Parnassus: An Anthology of Poetry. 1880.

The Flower

George Herbert (1593–1633)

(See full text.)

HOW fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;

To which, besides their own demean,

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

Grief melts away

Like snow in May,

As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shrivelled heart

Could have recovered greenness?

It was gone

Quite underground; as flowers depart

To see their mother root, when they have blown;

Where they together

All the hard weather,

Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing: O my only light,

It cannot be

That I am he

On whom thy tempests fell all night.