Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By Poems, Lyrics, and Sonnets (1882). I. Bees in Clover. A SongLouisa S. Guggenberger (1845–1895)
U
Follow me;
Every smoky spy-glass scorning,
Look and see, look and see
How the simple sun is rising,
Not approving nor despising
You and me.
Hear not those who bid you wait
Till they find the sun’s birth-date,
Preaching children, savage sages,
To their mouldy, blood-stuck pages
And the quarrelling of ages,
Leave them all; and come and see
Just the little honied clover,
As the winging music-bees
Come in busy twos and threes
Humming over!
All without a theory
Quite successfully, you see;
Little priests that wed the flowers,
Little preachers in their way,
Through the sunny working day
With their quite unconscious powers
How they say their simple say.
What? a wife-shriek in the alley?
Tune the bell a little better,
Help the woman bear her fetter.
All in time! all in time!
If you will but take your fill
Of the dawn-light on the hill,
And behold the dew-gems glisten,—
If you turn your soul to listen
To the bees among the thyme.
There may chance a notion to you
To encourage and renew you,
For the doing and the speaking,
Ere the jarring of the chime,
And the mad despair of shrieking
Call you downward to the mending
Of a folly, and the ending
Of a crime.
Do you ask?—do you ask?
How to tune the bells that jangle?
How to still the hearts that wrangle?—
For a task?
When the bell shall suit the ears
Of the strong man’s hopes and fears,
As the bee-wing suits the clover
And the clover suits the bee,
Then the din shall all be over,
And the woman shall be free,
And the bell ring melody,
Do you see?—do you see?
There are bees upon the hill,
And the sun is climbing still,
To his noon;
Shall it not be pretty soon
That the wife she shall be well,
And the jarring of the bell
Falls in tune?