"Garden Under Lightning" (A Poem)

First published in 1921, Leonora Speyer’s poem “Garden Under Lightening” was among the many verses written by the violinist, who won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry with her book Fiddler’s Farewell (1926).[1] In this poem, the author presents a short ghost story about the dead narrator seeing the garden she once tilled during her life.

 

Out of the storm that muffles shining night

Flash roses ghastly-sweet,

And lilies far too pale.

There is a pang of livid light,

A terror of familiarity,

I see a dripping swirl of leaves and petals

That I once tended happily,

Borders of flattened, frightened little things

And writhing paths I surely walked in that other life—

Day?

 

My specter-garden beckons to me,

Gibbers horribly—

And vanishes![2]

 

Works Referenced

 

Benet, William Rose, ed. Poems for Youth: An American Anthology. New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1925.

 

Speyer. Leonora. “Garden Under Lightning.” Poems for Youth: An American Anthology. Ed. William Rose Benet. New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1925. 321.

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[1] Benet, 320.

[2] Speyer, 321.