The Violets

I went not to the Dean’s unbid:I would not have my mystery,From her so delicately hid,The guess of gossips at their tea.A long, long week, and not once there,Had made my spirit sick and faint,And lack-love, foul as love is fair,Perverted all things to complaint.How vain the world had grown to be!How mean all people and their ways,How ignorant their sympathy,And how impertinent their praise;What they for virtuousness esteem’d,How far removed from heavenly right;What pettiness their trouble seem’d,How undelightful their delight;To my necessity how strangeThe sunshine and the song of birds;How dull the clouds’ continual change,How foolishly content the herds;How unaccountable the lawWhich bade me sit in blindness here,While she, the sun by which I saw,Shed splendour in an idle sphere!And then I kiss’d her stolen glove,And sigh’d to reckon and defineThe modes of martyrdom in love,And how far each one might be mine.I thought how love, whose vast estateIs earth and air and sun and sea,Encounters oft the beggar’s fate,Despised on score of poverty;How Heaven, inscrutable in this,Lets the gross general make or marThe destiny of love, which isSo tender and particular;How nature, as unnaturalAnd contradicting nature’s source,Which is but love, seems most of allWell-pleased to harry true love’s course;How, many times, it comes to passThat trifling shades of temperament,Affecting only one, alas,Not love, but love’s success prevent;How manners often falsely paintThe man; how passionate respect,Hid by itself, may bear the taintOf coldness and a dull neglect;And how a little outward dustCan a clear merit quite o’ercloud,And make her fatally unjust,And him desire a darker shroud;How senseless opportunityGives baser men the better chance;How powers, adverse else, agreeTo cheat her in her ignorance;How Heaven its very self conspiresWith man and nature against love,As pleased to couple cross desires,And cross where they themselves approve.Wretched were life, if the end were now!But this gives tears to dry despair,Faith shall be blest, we know not how,And love fulfill’d, we know not where.

While thus I grieved, and kiss’d her glove,My man brought in her note to say,Papa had hid her send his love,And would I dine with them next day?They had learn’d and practised Purcell’s glee,To sing it by to-morrow night.The Postscript was: Her sisters and sheInclosed some violets, blue and white;She and her sisters found them whereI wager’d once no violets grew;So they had won the gloves. And thereThe violets lay, two white, one blue.