To My Class: On Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in Sickness

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To My Class: On Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in Sickness
by Sidney Lanier

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Sidney Lanier composed this sonnet in Baltimore, Maryland at Christmas, 1880, just a few weeks before he passed away. His class in English Literature, composed of young girls, had been studying Chaucer’s The Knighte’s Tale when he was stricken with illness. His sonnet “On Violet’s Wafers, Sent Me When I Was Ill” was similarly conceived for a member of that same class.

117487To My Class: On Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in SicknessSidney Lanier

If spicy-fringed pinks that blush and pale
      With passions of perfume, —if violets blue
      That hint of heaven with odor more than hue, —
If perfect roses, each a holy Grail
Wherefrom the blood of beauty doth exhale
      Grave raptures round, —if leaves of green as new
      As those fresh chaplets wove in dawn and dew
By Emily when down the Athenian vale
She paced, to do observance to the May,
      Nor dreamed of Arcite nor of Palamon, —
If fruits that riped in some more riotous play
      Of wind and beam that stirs our temperate sun, —
            If these the products be of love and pain,
            Oft may I suffer, and you love, again.