Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A HYACINTH FOR EDITH, by ARTHUR JAMES MARSHALL SMITH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A HYACINTH FOR EDITH, by                 Poet Analysis    
First Line: Now that the ashen rain of gummy april
Last Line: Of our lost innocence, our ghostly childhood.
Alternate Author Name(s): Smith, A. J. M.
Subject(s): Childhood Memories; Children; Hyacinths; Past; Childhood


Now that the ashen rain of gummy April
Clacks like a weedy and stain'd mill,

So that all the tall purple trees
Are pied porpoises in swishing seas,

And the yellow horses and milch cows
Come out of their long frosty house

To gape at the straining flags
The brown pompous hill wags,

I'll seek within the woods' black plinth
A candy-sweet sleek wooden hyacinth—

And in its creaking naked glaze,
And in the varnish of its blaze,

The bird of ecstasy shall sing again,
The bearded sun shall spring again,

—A new ripe fruit upon the sky's high tree,
A flowery island in the sky's wide sea—

And childish cold ballades, long dead, long mute,
Shall mingle with the gayety of bird and fruit,

And fall like cool and soothing rain
On all the ardour, all the pain

Lurking within this tinsel paradise
Of trams and cinemas and manufactured ice,

Till I am grown again my own lost ghost
Of joy, long lost, long given up for lost,

And walk again the wild and sweet wildwood
Of our lost innocence, our ghostly childhood.





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