THE news of Queen Anne's death comes to arouse The Dead, in the quilted red satin house Where the country gentlemen from their birth Like kind red strawberries root in earth. Then weeping come the dairy girls With their ivy curls and their cheeks like pearls; They leave the cheese and they leave the milk That Pan will steal -- it is white as silk. Peruked waves curl and break a splinter From the flat pearled shore of winter; And candle-flames bob like strawberries low Over the thick and the cream-like snow; While the dairy girls weep; "Who cares," they said, "If old and cross Queen Anne be dead?" They wept, "She lies in her palace chamber Embalmed in the cold, like a wasp in amber, While a fawning courtier-like air roves In among the dark shadow-groves. . . . And dead is our faun who loved the sheen Of the snow that is cold as a nectarine!" | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...CONCORD HYMN; SUNG AT COMPLETION OF CONCORD MONUMENT, 1836 by RALPH WALDO EMERSON THE DEAD HEROES by ISAAC ROSENBERG LINES ON THE MONUMENT OF GIUSEPPE MAZZINI by ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE THE DEATH OF ADONIS by THEOCRITUS THE MORAL WARFARE by JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER SOLOMON SCHECHTER by ALTER ABELSON IN APRIL by MARGARET LEE ASHLEY |