Explore "Middleton Garden" by Hervey Allen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
This is a garden where the Son of Heaven / Well might walk, / With all his dragon-broidered mandarins, / To the plucked sound of tenor instruments, / With peacocks, kites, and little red balloons, / Mirrored with incense and rice-paper lights, / And old bronze lanterns on the full moon nights, / Upon the lacquered, porcelain-pink lagoons.
If cardinals in sun-blood robes were here / To kiss the ring of gorgeous Borgia popes; / Or bold de Gama's loot from Malabar: / Topaz and ruby, chrysolite and beryl, / The golden idol with a thousand hands, / And ropes of pearl; / They would seem lesser than these flowers are, / Whose masculine magnificence makes riches pale.