Read "Flowers on the Bank" by Thomas Gordon Hake online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I: Flowers on the bank,-we pass and call them gay: / The primroses throw pictures to the mind, / The buttercups lag dazzlingly behind, / And daisy-friends we spy but do not say / A word of joy; -thoughts of them follow not, / And soon are they forgot.
II: What care we for wildflowers except their name? / Bright maidens at the sight in rapture start, / Which, as our smiles say, comes not from the heart: / Flowers dance not, sing not, all their ways are tame; / They love not, neither love in us inspire; / Nor blush when we admire.
III: Yet stay, the fingers of that panting child / Have culled for us the choice ones,-many a gem,- / Have set their lovely colours stem to stem / In her fond hands they are not tame or wild, / Nestled in fringy fern so changed appears / The little gift she bears!
IV: She gives herself, and she can dance and sing, / And she can love inspire and blush at praise; / The flowers are part of her, have caught her ways; / She gives herself who gives so sweet a thing. / And she is gone, with other thoughts than ours / Gathering fresh love and flowers.