Explore "Camellia and Meadow-Daisy" by Théophile Gautier on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
We praise the hot-house flowers that loom / Far from their native sun and shade, / The flaring forms that flaunt their bloom, / Like jewels under glass displayed.
With never breeze to kiss their heads, / They have their birth and live and die / On costly, artificial beds, / Beneath an ever-crystal sky.
For whomsoever idly scans, / Baring their treasures to entice, / Like fair and sumptuous courtesans, / They stand for sale at golden price.
Fine porcelain holds their gathered groups, / Or glove-clad fingers fondle them / Between the dances, till each droops / Upon a limp or broken stem.
But down amid the grass unreaped, / Shunning the curious, in repose / And silence all the long day steeped, / A little woodland daisy blows.
A butterfly upon the wing / To point the place, a casual look, / And you surprise the sweet, shy thing, / Within its calm, sequestered nook.
Beneath the blue it openeth, / Rising on slender, vernal rod, / Spreading its soul in fragrant breath / For solitude and for its God.
And proud camellias tall and white, / Red tulips in a flaming mass, / Are all at once forgotten quite, / For the small flower amid the grass.