The Use of Flowers

The Use of Flowers
Mary Hewitt
1799-1888

God might have bade the earth bring forth

        Enough for great and small,
The oak-tree and the cedar-tree,
        Without a flower at all.
We might have had enough, enough
        For every want of ours,
For luxury, medicine, and toil,
        And yet have had no flowers.

Then wherefore, wherefore were they made,

        All dyed with rainbow light,
All fashioned with supremest grace,
        Upspringing day and night: --
Springing in valleys green and low,
        And on the mountains high,
And in the silent wilderness
        Where no man passes by?

From:  The Gardener’s Book of Poems and Poesies.  Compiled by Cary O. Yager.  ©1996 by Contemporary Books, Inc. Two Prudential Plaza, Chicago, Illinois 60601-6790.