by Coleridge · Cluster: Transience · Decay · Carpe Diem
Abstract
A lyric on a too-early blossom doomed by winter, likened to a consumptive girl, to Chatterton, and to Poland’s killed hope; themes of transience, mortality, and the fragility of hope.
Connections
Motifs: Flowers, Winter Themes & Concepts: Transience, Mortality, Artist and Society Forms & Genres: Lyric
Testo integrale / Full text
Sweet flower! that peeping from thy russet stem
Unfoldest timidly, (for in strange sort
This dark, frieze-coated, hoarse, teeth-chattering month
Hath borrow’d Zephyr’s voice, and gazed upon thee
With blue voluptuous eye) alas, poor Flower! 5
These are but flatteries of the faithless year.
Perchance, escaped its unknown polar cave,
Even now the keen North-East is on its way.
Flower that must perish! shall I liken thee
To some sweet girl of too too rapid growth 10
Nipp’d by consumption mid untimely charms?
Or to Bristowa’s bard, the wondrous boy!
An amaranth, which earth scarce seem’d to own,
Till disappointment came, and pelting wrong
Beat it to earth? or with indignant grief 15
Shall I compare thee to poor Poland’s hope,
Bright flower of hope killed in the opening bud?
Farewell, sweet blossom! better fate be thine
And mock my boding! Dim similitudes
Weaving in moral strains, I’ve stolen one hour 20
From anxious Self, Life’s cruel taskmaster!
And the warm wooings of this sunny day
Tremble along my frame and harmonize
The attempered organ, that even saddest thoughts
Mix with some sweet sensations, like harsh tunes 25
Played deftly on a soft-toned instrument.
1796.