National Poetry Month continues...

"The Violet"

by Jane Taylor

Down in a green and shady bed
     A modest violet grew
Its stalk was bent, it hung its head
     As if to hide from view.

And yet it was a lovely flower
     Its colors bright and fair;
It might have graced a rosy bower
     Instead of hiding there,

Yet there it was content to bloom
     In modest tints arrayed;
And there diffused its sweet perfume,
     Within the silent shade.

Then let me to the valley go,
     This pretty flower to see;
That I may also learn to grow
     In sweet humility.

1804



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Special Poetry Edition...

interdisciple's comment on my last poetry post got me to thinking. I went pawing through my collection of literature looking for the most modern poetry.

I came up with some Robert Frost. The most recent poem in my possession is "Away!" written just a few weeks before Frost died (January 1963).

Watch this space for the other "modern" poets I've started rereading: Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. (No Sylvia Plath, though. I like my wrists unsliced. :)

Away!

Now I out walking
The world desert,
And my shoe and my stocking
Do me no hurt.

I leave behind
Good friends in town,
Let them get well-wined
And go lie down.

Don't think I leave
For the outer dark
Like Adam and Eve
Put out of the Park.

Forget the myth.
There is no one I
Am put out with
Or put out by.

Unless I'm wrong
I but obey
The urge of a song:
I'm--bound--away!

And I may return
If dissatisfied
With what I learn
From having died.