Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, DESOLATED GARDENS, by RICHARD EUGENE BURTON



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

DESOLATED GARDENS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The trampling armies leave discomforted
Last Line: O desolated gardens, with your graves!
Subject(s): Birds; Flowers; Gardens & Gardening; Graves; Love; Soul; Tombs; Tombstones


THE trampling armies leave discomforted
How many a garden! Desolate and dead
The shining flowers whose soul breathed up to God
In winsome odors from the quiet sod.

Where the rose laughed, the dark ensanguined mire,
And where the birds in many a leafy choir
Greeted the sun, the cannon and the shell
Have changed an Eden to a shrieking hell.

No lilies left that erst rose tall and white,
Nor tulips proud a-blow, nor that fair sight,
The pansies of the many-winking eyes;
Ah, blight for bloom and rain for tranquil skies!

Of old, how often lovers kept a tryst
In such hid haunts, how tenderly they kissed;
But love is now turned hate, the very grass
Is color-changed with blood of those who pass.

Lovers and birds alike have fled the place,
The writhen body and the upturned face
Know naught of love or song or carefree hours
That blessed the alleys of these blameless flowers.

O refuges so rifled and so dim
Of color, what to you the martial hymn!
How sweet you were where now the battle raves,
O desolated gardens, with your graves!





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