5

10

See and scorn all duller!

Taste how Heaven loves color!

How great Nature, clearly, joys in red and green!
What sweet thoughts she thinks

Of violets and pinks,

And a thousand flashing hues made solely to be seen;
See her whitest lilies

Chill the silver showers;

And what a red mouth has her rose, the woman of her flowers!

Uselessness divinest,

Of a use the finest,

Painteth us, the teachers of the end of use.

Travelers, weary-eyed,

Bless us far and wide;

15 Unto sick and prisoned thoughts we give sudden truce. Not a poor town window

20

25

Loves its sickliest planting,

But its wall speaks loftier truth than Babylonian vaunting.

Sagest yet the uses

Mixed with our sweet juices,

Whether man or may-fly profits of the balm.

As fairy fingers healed

Knights of the olden field,

We hold cups of mightiest force to give the wildest calm.
E'en the terror, poison,

Hath its plea for blooming;

Life it gives to reverent lips, though death to the presuming.

And oh! our sweet soul-taker,

That thief, the honey-maker,

30 What a house hath he by the thymy glen!

In his talking rooms

How the feasting fumes,

Till his gold-cups overflow to the mouths of men!

The butterflies come aping

Those fine thieves of ours,

And flutter round our rifled tops like tickled flowers with flowers.

See those tops, how beauteous!

What fair service duteous

Round some idol waits, as on their lord the Nine?
Elfin court 'twould seem,

And taught, perchance, that dream

10 Which the old Greek mountain dreamt upon nights divine; To expound such wonder,

15

20

Human speech avails not,

Yet there dies no poorest weed that such a glory exhales not.

Think of all these treasures,

Matchless works and pleasures,

Every one a marvel, more than thought can say;

Then think in what bright showers

We thicken fields and bowers,

And with what heaps of sweetness half stifle wanton May.
Think of the mossy forests

By the bee-birds haunted,

And all those Amazonian plains, lone lying, as enchanted.

Trees themselves are ours;

Fruits are born of flowers;

25 Peach and roughest nut were blossoms in the spring. The lusty bee knows well

30

The news, and comes pell-mell

And dances in the bloomy thicks with darksome antheming.

Beneath the very burden

Of planet-pressing ocean

We wash our smiling cheeks in peace, a thought for meek devotion.

5

Who shall say that flowers

Dress not heaven's own bowers?

Who its love without them can fancy-or sweet floor?

Who shall even dare

To say we sprang not there,

And came not down, that Love might bring one piece of heaven the more?

Oh! pray believe that angels

From those blue dominions

Brought us in their white laps down, 'twixt their golden pinions.

NOTES AND QUESTIONS

Biographical and Historical Note. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was an English poet, journalist, and essayist. He was a personal friend of Shelley and Byron, and an intimate friend of Keats. His poems and essays are marked by a delightful style.

The "Nine" (stanza 7) refers to the Muses, patronesses of poetry and music, whose lord is Apollo, and who assembled on Mount Parnassus or Mount Helicon, to hold learned discussions on poetry, science, or music.

Discussion. 1. What is a chorus? 2. Who are the singers? 3. What is the purpose of their song? 4. When you look at a flower, what things are you apt to notice about it? 5. Name a poem you have read that tells of the uses of a flower. 6. What poem that you have read in this book celebrates the color of the flower? 7. What familiar custom grows out of the belief that "unto sorrow we give smiles"? That "unto graces [we give] graces"? 8. For what purpose are flowers in "a thousand flashing hues"? 9. What things are compared in the last line of stanza 4? 10. What uses of flowers are pointed out in stanza 5? 11. In stanza 7 what is compared with the "Nine" muses? 12. Read the lines that tell what lesson the sea-weeds teach. 13. What does the last stanza suggest as a possible source and use of flowers? 14. Which stanza do you like best?

TREES

JOYCE KILMER

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree;

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

NOTES AND QUESTIONS

Biography. Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) was born in New Brunswick, N. J. He was one of the first Americans to be deeply moved by Germany's challenge to humanity. He gave up his journalistic career in New York, and enlisted seventeen days after the United States declared war. He was attached to the Intelligence Department of the army, one of his duties being to precede the troops before an attack and find out the positions of the enemy guns. He served during almost the whole of the battle of the Marne until August first, 1918, when he received a mortal wound. Kilmer was the first American man of letters to be killed in the war. At the time of his enlistment he was the editor of poetry for the Literary Digest. Discussion. 1. Do you agree with the poet's conclusion given in the first stanza? 2. What is the most beautiful poem you have read? 3. What fact relating to the tree does the second couplet tell? The third couplet? The fourth? The fifth? 4. What does the last couplet tell you?

hungry mouth, 68, 3

earth's sweet flowing breast, 68, 4

Phrases

looks at God all day, 68, 5
nest of robins in her hair, 68, 8

A blizzard on the prairie corresponds to a storm at sea; it never affects the traveler twice alike. Each norther seems to have a manner of attack all its own. One storm may be short, sharp, high-keyed, and malevolent, while another approaches slowly, 5 relentlessly, wearing out the souls of its victims by its inexorable and long-continued cold and gloom. One threatens for hours before it comes, the other leaps like a tiger upon the defenseless settlement, catching the children unhoused, the men unprepared; of this character was the first blizzard Lincoln ever saw.

10

The day was warm and sunny. The eaves dripped musically, and the icicles dropping from the roof fell occasionally with pleasant crash. The snow grew slushy, and the bells of wood teams jingled merrily all the forenoon, as the farmers drove to their timber-lands five or six miles away. The room was uncomfort15 ably warm at times, and the master opened the outside door. It was the eighth day of January. One afternoon recess, as the boys were playing in their shirt-sleeves, Lincoln called Milton's attention to a great cloud rising in the west and north. A vast, slaty