Perished by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Name: Perished
Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"Perished" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox is a short lyric poem structured around a central contrast between the renewal of the natural world and the irreversible death of a personal hope. The poem unfolds across four stanzas. In the first three, the speaker issues commands to the forces of nature — the summer sun, the robin, the orchard, the meadow — and nature obeys without hesitation. The sun thaws the rivers and melts the snow. The robin returns from the south and fills the air with song. The trees bloom white like brides in a row, and the meadows burst forth with daisies, violets, and buttercups. Each stanza builds a picture of total, effortless renewal. The natural world is responsive, cyclical, and obedient to the speaker's summons. The fourth stanza pivots sharply. The speaker turns the same commanding voice — the same imperative "Come back!" — toward a hope that died alongside the previous autumn's flowers and grass. The speaker reasons that since the river runs again, the robin sings, and the daisies bloom, there is cause enough for a dead hope to be resurrected as well. But the appeal fails entirely. Nature's logic does not extend to the inner life. The hope, the poem insists, "too rudely perished" to ever awaken again — and no number of returning summers, even a hundred, can restore it. The poem's emotional argument rests on this asymmetry. Nature is renewable by design; grief and lost hope are not. The exuberant, almost incantatory rhythm of the first three stanzas — with their internal rhymes ("gushing, gurgling, rushing"; "lights and shadows") and sense of joyful command — makes the collapse of the final stanza all the more stark. The speaker's authority over the natural world is complete and absolute; their authority over their own inner life is nil. Wilcox does not specify what the hope was — a love, an ambition, a relationship, a belief — leaving it deliberately general so that readers may map their own losses onto the poem. The word "perished" in the title carries a weight beyond ordinary disappointment; it signals something that did not merely fade but was extinguished, permanently, by some unspecified violence or rupture implied in the phrase "too rudely perished." The poem belongs to Wilcox's characteristic mode: emotionally direct, metrically musical, and built on a clear conceptual opposition. It is brief but structurally disciplined, using natural imagery not as decoration but as argumentative scaffolding. Spring's return serves not to comfort the speaker but to sharpen the contrast with what cannot return — making the poem an elegy less for a person or thing than for hope itself as a faculty, once broken beyond repair.

By Ella Wheeler Wilcox · First published 1905 · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Romantic Poetry, Nature Poetry · 333 words

First lines

I called to the summer sun, / "Come over the hills to-day! / Unlock the rivers, and tell them to run, / And kiss the snow-drifts and melt them away. " / And the sun came over -- a tardy lover -- / And unlocked the river, and told it to glide / And kissed the snow-drift till it fainted and died.

I called to the robin, "Come back! / Come up from the south and sing! " / And robin sailed up on an airy track, / And smoothed down his feathers and oiled his wing. / And the notes came gushing, gurgling, rushing, / In thrills and quavers, clear, mellow and strong, / Till the glad air quivered and rang with song.

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Perished is listed on Textopian as a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, dated 1905 CE.

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Work type: Poem
Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Date: 1905 CE
Language: English
Genres: Lyric Poetry, Romantic Poetry, Nature Poetry, Elegy, Narrative Poetry
Length: 333 words
Structure: 1 section, 4 paragraphs
Reading fit: Easy (6th Grade)

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Genres

Lyric Poetry — Expresses personal emotion and subjective experience through first-person voice; the poem's core intent is to convey the speaker's inner emotional state rather than a primarily narrative or dramatic purpose.
Romantic Poetry — Emphasizes intense emotion, the power of nature to evoke feeling, themes of melancholy and disillusionment, and explores the tension between external beauty and internal despair characteristic of Romantic tradition.
Nature Poetry — Extensively employs natural imagery (sun, robin, orchard, meadow, flowers, rivers) and personification of natural elements as the primary vehicle for exploring human emotion and loss.
Elegy — Mourns the death of hope and expresses sorrow for irretrievable loss; the final stanza explicitly laments what 'perished' and cannot be recovered despite external renewal.