Flower Of The Painter

I have painted many flowers in my time,
Flowers to illustrate a garden portrait,
Flowers to illustrate a book of rhyme,
And nothing has come out of it,
For my flowers are small and tame.
I will leave behind me no great name.

There are painters of my acquaintance
Who can make their flowers grow
There on the canvas where they dance;
They can make the colors brighter glow
Than any natural flower ever has.
They are more delicate than spun glass.

But I have not the trick of that art,
For it requires long hours spent before
The canvas and garden in the heart.
I have only one flower I adore,
And she is my daughter, still a girl,
Yet the loveliest flower in all the world.

I will not say her eyes are bluebells;
Nor are they the blue of a winter sky
Such as pictured in many a painting’s dells
Arching overhead, as if blue on high
Alone could capture the mood of the day.
Perhaps it can, and my heart goes astray

In thinking that only a child’s laughter can.
I remember a summer day, much like another,
Save that there was nowhere a happier man,
Seated on the grass with my girl’s mother,
While she ran back and forth as if lost,
Celebrating the death of the last frost.

We live in the mountains; spring comes late.
But when it comes, spangled with dew empearled,
Then no one could wish for a happier fate;
Our summers are the loveliest in all the world,
And loveliest of all that day was my flower,
Shining like true love in all its power.

I will not say her hair is like spun gold,
Not like the hair of the painted queen
So oft seen in pictures, by a cold
Mountain stream, or climbing a green
Slope that would not exist in our mountains.
Nor is her laughter like snow-cold fountains.

But it is pretty enough, and my heart grows
Towards it as no flower towards the sun.
I pick her up in the garden, my rose,
And she laughs and kicks; she wants to run.
And she runs to express her mirth,
A dance that no flower rooted in earth

Could ever equal in dip or in sway.
My daughter lies in her bed; I tell her stories
That make her shiver till night goes away,
And then she runs to play with morning glories.
I need the flowers for a picture to paint,
But I cannot resist her sweet child’s plaint.

If I painted her, they would see a face,
Not even elfin, as so many I have seen
Touched up with the brush to give fey grace
To these children standing on a green
That, again, could not live in our high hills.
She has only a grace that warms the rills

In the heart of winter, and makes me see
Light there in the heart of dark.
All around me, the summer comes early
In light on leaf, in song of lark,
If she but turns to me and smiles.
I could not be happier on the Blessed Isles.

No, I will go on painting my flowers
That will not live beyond my time,
And grant to others the brush’s powers
For portraits, landscapes, books of rhyme.
I would love to immortalize my child,
But my brush’s powers could not catch the wild

Grace that animates her, or the sun
That shines in her eyes as away she spins
In the garden to laugh and run
Her shadow in a race she always wins.
I will content myself with reflected power;
I will content myself with my flower.