Explore "The Plum Gatherer" by Edna St. Vincent Millay on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The angry nettle and the mild / Grew together under the blue-plum trees.
I could not tell as a child / Which was my friend of these.
Always the angry nettle in the skirt of his sister / Caught my wrist that reached over the ground,
Where alike I gathered,-for the one was sweet and the other wore a frosty dust- / The broken plum and the sound.
The plum-trees are barren now and the black knot is upon them, / That stood so white in the spring.
I would give, to recall the sweetness and the frost of the lost blue plums, / Anything, anything.
I thrust my arm among the grey ambiguous nettles, and wait.
/ But they do not sting.