Alfred H. Miles, ed. The Sacred Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By Memorials of Theophilus Trinal, Student (1850). III. The Five FlowersThomas Toke Lynch (18181871)
“L
Are flowers five;
But one has droop’d its head—
Four alone live.”
Were children five:
One rests in grassy darkness—
Four alone live.”
The fifth, not as they—
Its colour, and form, and odour,
Have passed away.
Take, then, from your bosom
The withered one:
Can the air now nourish it?
Can it feel the sun?”
With a fresh willow leaf,
That grew large by a river,
As by flowing love, grief;
And they all will fall asunder
If I loose the tie;
So a love-clasp for living babes
Is a dead one’s memory.”
Its sweet shelter share;
As bound in one, within your heart,
Our five darlings are.
The dead make the living dearer;
And we will joy the more,
That the Giver, who has taken one,
Has left us four.”