Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TO AN ENGLISH FRIEND, by OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO AN ENGLISH FRIEND, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: The seed that wasteful autumn cast
Last Line: From age to age, from clime to clime!
Subject(s): England; English


THE seed that wasteful autumn cast
To waver on its stormy blast,
Long o'er the wintry desert tost,
Its living germ has never lost.
Dropped by the weary tempest's wing,
It feels the kindling ray of spring,
And, starting from its dream of death,
Pours on the air its perfumed breath.

So, parted by the rolling flood,
The love that springs from common blood
Needs but a single sunlit hour
Of mingling smiles to bud and flower;
Unharmed its slumbering life has flown,
From shore to shore, from zone to zone,
Where summer's falling roses stain
The tepid waves of Pontchartrain,
Or where the lichen creeps below
Katahdin's wreaths of whirling snow.

Though fiery sun and stiffening cold
May change the fair ancestral mould,
No winter chills, no summer drains
The life-blood drawn from English veins,
Still bearing whereso'er it flows
The love that with its fountain rose,
Unchanged by space, unwronged by time,
From age to age, from clime to clime!





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