[Editor: This poem by Mary Eliza Fullerton was published in Moods and Melodies: Sonnets and Lyrics (1908).]
The Reformer
I dreamed one night that it was morn, and all
The earth sprang quick beneath the gift of growth:
The tossing grass, the trailing weeds uncouth,
Answered with swelling node lush Nature’s call
With glad aspiring haste to climb or sprawl.
To work its seed’s behest was no thing loth
That sun, nor earth, nor God should hate its sloth;
So hummed the pulse of all things great and small.
But Man, though earth o’erran with flower and weed,
Still slept, I thought, while rusted scythe and spade;
No hand was raised to pluck the gracious seed,
To kill the hemlock and the foul nightshade;
Till from his cot a peasant urchin leapt
And with a shout aroused the world that slept.
Source:
Mary E. Fullerton, Moods and Melodies: Sonnets and Lyrics, Melbourne: Thomas C. Lothian, 1908, p. 35
Editor’s notes:
cot = a portable bed (made of fabric, especially canvas, stretched over a folding frame); can also refer to a crib (a bed for a baby or small child; an enclosed bed with high sides) or a cottage or a small house
loth = reluctant or unwilling; a variant spelling of “loath” (as distinct from “loathe”, being to detest or hate)
morn = morning
o’erran = (archaic) overran
sloth = slow movement (may also refer to: habitual reluctance to exert one’s self, make an effort, or to work; idleness, indolence, laziness, slackness; a species of animal, native to Central and South America, which lives in trees and moves very slowly)
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