Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)
The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart
1ALL things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
2The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
3The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
4Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
5The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;
6I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,
7With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold
8For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: Yeats, William Burtler. W. B. Yeats: Selected Poetry: 16. Ed. by A. Norman Jeffares. London: Macmillan, 1968.
First publication date:
1899
Publication date note: The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899.
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire, assisted by Ana Berdinskikh
RP edition: 2009
Recent editing: 1:2009/6/3
Form: quatrains
Rhyme: abab
Other poems by Elinor Wylie
