ORCHID
Orchis
In the marsh pink orchid's faces,
With their coy and dainty graces,
Lure us to their hiding places—
Laugh, O murmuring Spring!
Around the pillars of the palm-tree bower
The orchids cling, in rose and purple spheres;
Shield-broad the lily floats; the aloe flower
Foredates its hundred years.
ORDER
Let all things be done decently and in order.
For the world was built in order
And the atoms march in tune;
Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder,
The sun obeys them, and the moon.
Can any man have a higher notion of the rule
of right and the eternal fitness of things?
Set thine house in order.
To make the plough go before the horse.
Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar
Stood ruled, stood vast infinitude confined;
Till at his second bidding darkness fled,
Light shone, and order from disorder sprung.
Order is Heaven's first law; and this confess,
Some are and must be greater than the rest.
Not chaos-like together crush'd and bruis'd,
But, as the world, harmoniously confused:
Where order in variety we see,
And where tho' all things differ, all agree.
Folie est mettre la charrue devant les boeufs.
It is folly to put the plough in front of the oxen.
Not a mouse
Shall disturb this hallow'd house:
I am sent with broom before,
To sweep the dust behind the door.
The heavens themselves, the planets and this
centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order.
As order is heavenly, where quiet is had,
So error is hell, or a mischief as bad.
OWL
The large white owl that with eye is blind,
That hath sate for years in the old tree hollow.
Is carried away in a gust of wind.
The Roman senate, when within
The city walls an owl was seen,
Did cause their clergy, with lustrations
- * * *
The round-fac'd prodigy t' avert,
From doing town or country hurt.
In the hollow tree, in the old gray tower,
The spectral Owl doth dwell;
Dull, hated, despised, in the sunshine hour,
But at dusk—he's abroad and well!
Not a bird of the forest e'er mates with him—
All mock him outright, by day:
But at night, when the woods grow still and dim,
The boldest will shrink away!
O, when the night falls, and roosts the fowl,
Then, then, is the reign of the Horned Owl!
St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.
Keats—The Eve of St. Agnes.
The wailing owl
Screams solitary to the mournful moon.
The screech-owl, with ill-boding cry,
Portends strange things, old women say;
Stops every fool that passes by,
And frights the school-boy from his play.
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note.
It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the stern'st good night.
The clamorous owl, that nightly hoots and
wonders
At our quaint spirits.
O you virtuous owle,
The wise Minerva's only fowle.
