A Garden of Peace: A Medley in QuietudeMoore, Frank Frankfort
General
A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude
Moore, Frank Frankfort
Gardens -- Fiction
Sparkling Calendula Officinalis.
To me your smile brought sunshine that gray day,
The saddest Salex Babylonien
Became Anemone Japonica
And the whole world beneath its ray,
Bloomed one Escholtzia Californico.
Still in thy smile the summer airs caress us;
And now with thee my faith is sure:
The love that binds us shall endure--
Nay, growing day by day to bless us,
Ti'l o'er us waves Supervirens Cupressus.
“I hope I haven't bored you, sir. I don't pretend to be a poet; but you
see what my aim is, I'm sure--lucidity and accuracy--strict accuracy,
sir. Something that every one can understand.”
I assured him that he had convinced me that he understood his business:
he was incomparable--as a florist.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND
Among the features of our gardens for which I am not responsible, is
the grass walk alongside the Castle Wall, where it descends on one side,
by the remains of the terraces of the Duke's hanging gardens, fifty feet
into the original fosse, while on the other it breasts the ancient Saxon
earthwork, which reduces its height to something under fifteen, so that
the wall on our side is quite a low one, but happily of a breadth that
allows of a growth of wild things--lilacs and veronicas and the like--in
beautiful luxuriance, while the face is in itself a garden of crevices
where the wallflowers last long enough to mix with the snapdragons and
scores of modest hyssops and mosses and ferns that lurk in every cranny.
Was it beneath such a wall that Tennyson stood to wonder how he should
fulfil the commission he had received from _Good Words_--or was it _Once
a Week?_--for any sort of poem that would serve as an advertisement
of magazine enterprise, and he wrote that gem to which Mr. Gilbert had
referred?--
“Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
Hold you here, stem and all in my hand.
Little flower; but if I could understand
What you are, stem and all and all in all,
I should know what God and man is,”
I should like equal immortality to be conferred upon the parody which is
of far greater merit than the original:--
'Terrier in my granny's hall,
I whistle you out of my granny's;
Hold you here, tail and all in my hand.
Little terrier; but if I could understand
What you are, tail and all and all in all,
I should know what black-and-tan is.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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