Edith Nesbit: Verses about Winter

Here's a rose that blows for Chloe,
Fair as ever a rose in June was,
Now the garden's silent, snowy,
Where the burning summer noon was.

In your garden's summer glory
One poor corner, shelved and shady,
Told no rosy, radiant story,
Grew no rose to grace its lady.

What shuts sun out shuts out snow too;
From his nook your secret lover
Shows what slighted roses grow to
When the rose you chose is over.

Hold your hands to the blaze;
Winter is here
With the short cold days,
Bleak, keen and drear.
Was there ever a day
With hawthorn along the way
Where you wandered in mild mid-May
With your dear?

That was when you were young
And the world was gold;
Now all the songs are sung,
The tales all told.
You shiver now by the fire
Where the last red sparks expire;
Dead are delight and desire:
You are old.

The wind is crying in the night,
Like a lost child;
The waves break wonderful and white
And wild.
The drenched sea-poppies swoon along
The drenched sea-wall,
And there's an end of summer and of song -
An end of all.

The fingers of the tortured boughs
Gripped by the blast
Clutch at the windows of your house
Closed fast.
And the lost child of love, despair,
Cries in the night,
Remembering how once those windows were
Open and bright.

WHILE yet the air is keen, and no bird sings,
Nor any vaguest thrills of heart declare
The presence of the springtime in the air,
Through the raw dawn the shepherd homeward brings
The wee white lambs--the little helpless things--
For shelter, warmth, and comfortable care.
Without his help how hardly lambs would fare--
How hardly live through winter's hours to spring's!


So let me tend and minister apart
To my new hope, which some day you shall know:
It could not live in January wind
Of your disdain; but when within your heart
The bud and bloom of tenderness shall grow,
Amid the flowers my hope may welcome find.

THE trees stand brown against the gray,
The shivering gray of field and sky;
The mists wrapt round the dying day
The shroud poor days wear as they die:
Poor day, die soon, who lived in vain,
Who could not bring my Love again!


Down in the garden breezes cold
Dead rustling stalks blow chill between;
Only, above the sodden mould,
The wallflower wears his heartless green
As though still reigned the rose-crowned year
And summer and my Love were here.


The mists creep close about the house,
The empty house, all still and chill;
The desolate and trembling boughs
Scratch at the dripping window sill:
Poor day lies drowned in floods of rain,
And ghosts knock at the window pane.

'It is the skylark come.' For shame!
Robert-a-Cockney is thy name:
Robert-a-Field would surely know
That skylarks, bless them, never go!

* * *

Love of my life, bear witness here
How we have heard them all the year;
How to the skylark's song are set
The days we never can forget.
At Rustington, do you remember?
We heard the skylarks in December;
In January above the snow
They sang to us by Hurstmonceux
Once in the keenest airs of March
We heard them near the Marble Arch;
Their April song thrilled Tonbridge air;
May found them singing everywhere;
And oh, in Sheppey, how their tune
Rhymed with the bean-flower scent in June.
One unforgotten day at Rye
They sang a love-song in July;
In August, hard by Lewes town,
They sang of joy 'twixt sky and down;
And in September's golden spell
We heard them singing on Scaw Fell.
October's leaves were brown and sere,
But skylarks sang by Teston Weir;
And in November, at Mount's Bay,
They sang upon our wedding day!

* * *

Mr.-a-Field, go forth, go forth,
Go east and west and south and north;
You'll always find the furze in flower,
Find every hour the lovers' hour,
And, by my faith in love and rhyme,
The skylark singing all the time!