Read "The Patchwork Bonnet" by Robert Graves online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Across the room my silent love I throw, / Where you sit sewing in bed by candlelight, / Your young stern profile and industrious fingers / Displayed against the blind in a shadow show, / To Dinda's grave delight.
The needle dips and pokes, the cheerful thread / Runs after, follow-my-leader down the seam: / The patchwork pieces cry for joy together, / O soon to sit as a crown on Dinda's head, / Fulfilment of their dream.
Snippets and odd ends folded by, forgotten, / With camphor on a top shelf, hard to find, / Now wake to this most happy resurrection, / To Dinda playing toss with a reel of cotton / And staring at the blind.
Dinda in sing-song stretching out one hand / Calls for the playthings; mother does not hear: / Her mind sails far away on a patchwork Ocean, / And all the world must wait till she touches land, / So Dinda cries in fear,
Then Mother turns, laughing like a young fairy, / And Dinda smiles to see her look so kind, / Calls out again for playthings, playthings, playthings, / And now the shadows make an Umbrian "_Mary / Adoring_," on the blind.