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Home  »  The Book of the Sonnet  »  Frances Anne Kemble (1809–1893)

Hunt and Lee, comps. The Book of the Sonnet. 1867.

II. “What is my lady like?”

Frances Anne Kemble (1809–1893)

WHAT is my lady like? thou fain wouldst know.

A rosy chaplet of fresh apple-bloom,

Bound with blue ribbon, lying on the snow.

What is my lady like? The violet gloom

Of evening, with deep orange light below.

She ’s like the noonday smell of a pine wood;

She ’s like the sounding of a stormy flood;

She ’s like a mountain-top high in the skies,

To which the day its earliest light doth lend;

She ’s like a pleasant path without an end;

Like a strange secret, and a sweet surprise;

Like a sharp axe of doom, wreathed with blush-roses.

A casket full of gems whose key one loses;

Like a hard saying, wonderful and wise.