[Editor: This poem by Mary Eliza Fullerton was published in Moods and Melodies: Sonnets and Lyrics (1908).]
The Hothouse Orchid
Too strange for beauty, yet so delicate
The curious comer may not quickly pass,
Where flowers your alien bloom behind the glass
Frail and reluctant as did hesitate
To open foreign eyes disconsolate
In the sham tropics where the cold, alas!
Crawls to the marrow of the garden grass,
And kills the brave red climber at the gate.
Exiled in frosted house you gaze on this —
Leviathan chained, or ocean bird in cage,
The ebon slave compelled to meet the kiss
Of her rude captor, harder than his rage,
Than you imprisoned flower are not more curst,
Longing amid the snows for tropic thirst.
Source:
Mary E. Fullerton, Moods and Melodies: Sonnets and Lyrics, Melbourne: Thomas C. Lothian, 1908, p. 37
Editor’s notes:
curst = (archaic) cursed
ebon = dark brown or black; ebony
Leviathan = anything of massive size and power, such as a whale, cargo ship, corporation, or political state, especially an authoritarian state with a huge bureaucracy; an enormous animal or monstrous beast; a huge sea animal; a huge sea monster or sea serpent (such as mentioned in Job 41 and Psalm 74:14, in the Bible)
rude = primitive, raw, or rough, or in an unfinished state or natural condition (distinct from the modern usage of “rude” as someone being discourteous or ill-mannered)
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