[Editor: This poem by Mary Eliza Fullerton was published in Moods and Melodies: Sonnets and Lyrics (1908).]
The Gem
How many years have passed since from the gloom
Some avaricious hand your beauty bore?
Since cunning Art allured your glowing core
To flame its glory in perpetual bloom,
Was the deep rock or this your chosen doom?
Did the earth’s darkness please your humour more
Than flashing on yon captious Beauty for
The eyes that watch her progress through the room?
To help her charm insipid hearts and bring
Inconstancy to knee! Ah, what a fate
For you that did upon the marriage wait
Of all the elements, who heard Earth sing
Her primal song in your potential state
’Mid secret depths where Power went fashioning.
Source:
Mary E. Fullerton, Moods and Melodies: Sonnets and Lyrics, Melbourne: Thomas C. Lothian, 1908, p. 21
Editor’s notes:
captious = having a disposition to pedantically or unreasonably criticise or find fault, especially regarding frivolous, pedantic, petty, or trivial items; having a nature which is pleased to find faults or make criticisms, even over minor mistakes or trivial matters; carping, cavilling, hypercritical, nitpicky
yon = an abbreviation of “yonder”: at a distance; far away
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