Read "To Flowers from Italy in Winter" by Thomas Hardy online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
SUNNED in the South, and here to-day; / -If all organic things / Be sentient, Flowers, as some men say, / What are your ponderings?
How can you stay, nor vanish quite / From this bleak spot of thorn, / And birch, and fir, and frozen white / Expanse of the forlorn?
Frail luckless exiles hither brought! / Your dust will not regain / Old sunny haunts of Classic thought / When you shall waste and wane;
But mix with alien earth, be lit / With frigid Boreal flame, / And not a sign remain in it / To tell men whence you came.