Le Jardin Des Tuileries by Oscar Wilde — Read

This winter air is keen and cold, / And keen and cold this winter sun, / But round my chair the children run / Like little things of dancing gold.

Sometimes about the painted kiosk / The mimic soldiers strut and stride, / Sometimes the blue-eyed brigands hide / In the bleak tangles of the bosk.

And sometimes, while the old nurse cons / Her book, they steal across the square, / And launch their paper navies where / Huge Triton writhes in greenish bronze.

And now in mimic flight they flee, / And now they rush, a boisterous band --

And, tiny hand on tiny hand, / Climb up the black and leafless tree.

Ah! cruel tree! if I were you, / And children climbed me, for their sake / Though it be winter I would break / Into spring blossoms white and blue!