Poem by Thomas Hardy

The Flower’s Tragedy

In the bedchamber window, near the glass,
Stood the little flower in the little vase,
Unnoticed quite
For a whole fortnight,
And withered for lack of watering
To a skeleton mere – a mummied thing.

But it was not much, mid a world of teen,
That a flower should waste in a nook unseen!

One needed no thought to ascertain
How it happened; that when she went in the rain
To return here not,
She was mindless what
She had left here to perish. – Ah, well: for an hour
I wished I had not found the flower!

Yet it was not much. And she never had known
Of the flower’s fate; nor it of her own.

1. Song from Heine
2. The Aërolite
3. Genitrix Laesa
4. The Felled Elm and She
5. V.R. 1819–1901

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