The Farm and Fruit of Old/Preface

by Virgil

 

PREFACE.

ndulgence have ye for a gardener's dream,
(A man with native melody unblest,)
That patient toil and love which does its best,
Clouds though they be, may follow the sunbeam?

And in this waning of poetic day,
With all so misty, moonlit, and grotesque,
What harm to quit such medley picturesque,
And chase the sunset of a clearer ray?

Too well I know, by fruitless error taught,
How latent beauty hath fallacious clues,
How difficult to catch, how quick to lose
The mirage of imaginative thought.

And harder still to make that vision bear
The loose refraction of a modern tongue,
To render sight to hearing, old to young,
And fix my purview on a stranger's ear.

Too well I know, by market hopes misled,
How cheap are things that long have cost me dear;
And though I fail to graft the Poet here,
I fear to flaunt my wilding shoots instead.

But yonder lo, my amethysts and gold,
So please you—grapes and apricots—constrain
My more accustom'd hands; unless ye deign
To tend with me the "kine and bees of old."

C― Garden,
June, 1862.