Читать книгу Poems, and The Spring of Joy - Mary Webb - Страница 53

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And so, Anne Everard, in those leafy Junes

Long withered; in those ancient, dark Decembers,

Deep in the drift of time, haunted by tunes

Long silent: you, beside the homely embers,

Or in some garden fragrant and precise

Were diligent and attentive all day long!

Fashioning with bright wool and stitches nice

Your sampler, did you hear the thrushes’ song

Wistfully? While, in orderly array,

Six rounded trees grew up; the alphabet,

Stout and uncompromising, done in grey;

The Lord’s Prayer, and your age, in violet;

Did you, Anne Everard, dream from hour to hour

How the young wind was crying on the hill,

And the young world was breaking into flower?

With small head meekly bent, all mute and still,

Earnest to win the promised great reward,

Did you not see the birds, at shadow-time,

Come hopping all across the dewy sward?

Did you not hear the bells of Faery chime

Liquidly, where the brittle hyacinths grew?

Your dream—attention; diligence, your aim!

And when the last long needleful was through,

When, laboured for so long, the guerdon came—

Thomson, his Seasons, neatly bound in green—

How brightly would the golden letters shine!

Ah! many a petalled May the moon has seen

Since Anne—attentive, diligent, aetat nine—

Puckering her young brow, read the stately phrases.

Sampler and book are here without a stain—

Only Anne Everard lies beneath the daisies;

Only Anne Everard will not come again.