Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;And give us not to think so far awayAs the uncertain harvest; keep us hereAll simply in the springing of the year. Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;And make us happy in the happy bees,The swarm dilating round

The rose is a rose,And was always a rose.But the theory now goesThat the apple’s a rose,And the pear is, and so’sThe plum, I suppose.The dear only knowsWhat will next prove a rose.You, of course, are a rose –But were always a rose.

When a friend calls to me from the roadAnd slows his horse to a meaning walk,I don’t stand still and look aroundOn all the hills I haven’t hoed,And shout from where I am, What is it?No, not as there is a time to talk.I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,Blade-end up and five feet

A speck that would have been beneath my sightOn any but a paper sheet so whiteSet off across what I had written there.And I had idly poised my pen in airTo stop it with a period of inkWhen something strange about it made me think,This was no dust speck by my breathing blown,But unmistakably a

When I see birches bend to left and rightAcross the lines of straighter darker trees,I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen themLoaded with ice a sunny winter morningAfter a rain. They click upon themselvesAs the breeze rises, and turn

He halted in the wind, and – what was thatFar in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?He stood there bringing March against his thought,And yet too ready to believe the most. ‘Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom,’ I said;And truly it was fair enough for flowershad we but in us to assume in marchSuch white luxuriance

The farmhouse lingers, though averse to squareWith the new city street it has to wearA number in. But what about the brookThat held the house as in an elbow-crook?I ask as one who knew the brook, its strengthAnd impulse, having dipped a finger lengthAnd made it leap my knuckle, having tossedA flower to try its

A house that lacks, seemingly, mistress and master,With doors that none but the wind ever closes,Its floor all littered with glass and with plaster;It stands in a garden of old-fashioned roses. I pass by that way in the gloaming with Mary;‘I wonder,’ I say, ‘who the owner of those is.’‘Oh, no one you know,’ she

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,And spills the upper boulders in the sun;And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.The work of hunters is another thing:I have come after them and made repairWhere they have left not one stone on a stone,But they would have the rabbit out

There’s a patch of old snow in a cornerThat I should have guessedWas a blow-away paper the rainHad brought to rest. It is speckled with grime as ifSmall print overspread it,The news of a day I’ve forgotten —If I ever read it.