Elizabeth Barrett Browning - A Child's Grave at Florence (The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Vol. IV) lyrics

Of English blood, of Tuscan birth
 What country should we give her?
Instead of any on the earth
 The civic Heavens receive her

And here among the English tombs
 In Tuscan ground we lay her
While the blue Tuscan sky endomes
 Our English words of prayer

A little child! how long she lived
 By months, not years, is reckoned:
Born in one July, she survived
 Alone to see a second

Bright-featured, as the July sun
 Her little face still played in
And splendours, with her birth begun
 Had had no time for fading

So, Lily, from those July hours
 No wonder we should call her
She looked such kinship to the flowers
 Was but a little taller

A Tuscan Lily, only white
 As Dante, in abhorrence
Of red corruption, wished aright
 The lilies of his Florence

We could not wish her whiter, her
 Who perfumed with pure blossom
The house a lovely thing to wear
 Upon a mother’s bosom!

This July creature thought perhaps
 Our speech not worth assuming
She sat upon her parents’ laps
 And mimicked the gnat’s humming

Said "father, " "mother" then left off
 For tongues celestial, fitter:
Her hair had grown just long enough
 To catch heaven’s jasper-glitter

Babes! Love could always hear and see
 Behind the cloud that hid them
"Let little children come to Me
 And do not thou forbid them"

So, unforbidding, have we met
 And gently here have laid her
Though winter is no time to get
 The flowers that should o’erspread her:

We should bring pansies quick with spring
 Rose, violet, daffodilly
And also, above everything
 White lilies for our Lily

Nay, more than flowers, this grave exacts
 Glad, grateful attestations
Of her sweet eyes and pretty acts
 With calm renunciations

Her very mother with light feet
 Should leave the place too earthy
Saying "The angels have thee, Sweet
 Because we are not worthy"

But winter kills the orange-buds
 The gardens in the frost are
And all the heart dissolves in floods
 Remembering we have lost her

Poor earth, poor heart, too weak, too weak
 To miss the July shining!
Poor heart! what bitter words we speak
 When God speaks of resigning!

Sustain this heart in us that faints
 Thou God, the self-existent!
We catch up wild at parting saints
 And feel Thy heaven too distant

The wind that swept them out of sin
 Has ruffled all our vesture:
On the shut door that let them in
 We beat with frantic gesture

To us, us also, open straight!
 The outer life is chilly
Are we too, like the earth, to wait
 Till next year for our Lily?

Oh, my own baby on my knees
 My leaping, dimpled treasure
At every word I write like these
 Clasped close with stronger pressure!

Too well my own heart understands
 At every word beats fuller
My little feet, my little hands
 And hair of Lily’s colour!

But God gives patience, Love learns strength
 And Faith remembers promise
And Hope it'self can smile at length
 On other hopes gone from us

Love, strong as Death, shall conquer Death
 Through struggle made more glorious:
This mother stills her sobbing breath
 Renouncing yet victorious

Arms, empty of her child, she lifts
 With spirit unbereaven
"God will not all take back His gifts
 My Lily’s mine in heaven

"Still mine! maternal rights serene
 Not given to another!
The crystal bars shine faint between
 The souls of child and mother

"Meanwhile, " the mother cries, "content!
 Our love was well divided:
Its sweetness following where she went
 Its anguish stayed where I did

"Well done of God, to halve the lot
 And give her all the sweetness
To us, the empty room and cot
 To her, the Heaven’s completeness

"To us, this grave, to her, the rows
 The mystic palm-trees spring in
To us, the silence in the house
 To her, the choral singing

"For her, to gladden in God’s view
 For us, to hope and bear on
Grow, Lily, in thy garden new
 Beside the Rose of Sharon!

"Grow fast in heaven, sweet Lily clipped
 In love more calm than this is
And may the angels dewy-lipped
 Remind thee of our kisses!

"While none shall tell thee of our tears
 These human tears now falling
Till, after a few patient years
 One home shall take us all in

"Child, father, mother who, left out?
 Not mother, and not father!
And when, our dying couch about
 The natural mists shall gather

"Some smiling angel close shall stand
 In old Correggio’s fashion
And bear a Lily in his hand
 For death’s ANNUCIATION"