Part 2

For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn; The sap shrank to the root through every pore As blood to a heart that will beat no more.

LXVI

For Winter came: the wind was his whip: One choppy finger was on his lip: He had torn the cataracts from the hills And they clanked at his girdle like manacles.

LXVII

His breath was a chain which without a sound The earth, and the air, and the water bound; He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone

LXVIII

Then the weeds which were forms of living death, Fled from the frost to the earth beneath: Their decay and sudden flight from frost Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!

LXIX

And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant The moles and the dormice died for want; The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air, And were caught in the branches naked and bare.

LXX

First there came down a thawing rain, And its dull drops froze on the boughs again, Then there steamed up a freezing dew Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew;

LXXI

And a northern whirlwind, wandering about Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out, Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff, And snapped them off with his rigid griff.

LXXII

When winter had gone and spring came back The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck; But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels, Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.

CONCLUSION

LXXIII

Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat Ere its outward form had known decay, Now felt this change, I cannot say.

LXXIV

Whether that lady’s gentle mind No longer with the form combined Which scattered love, as stars do light, Found sadness, where it left delight,

LXXV

I dare not guess; but in this life Of error, ignorance, and strife, Where nothing is, but all things seem, And we the shadows of the dream,

LXXVI

It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.

LXXVII

That garden sweet, that lady fair, And all sweet shapes and odours there, In truth have never past away: ’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed; not they.

LXXVIII

For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death nor change: their might Exceeds our organs, which endure No light, being themselves obscure.

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. London & Edinburgh