I walked one evening through a garden green

"I walked one evening through a garden green" was a poem by the poet Chon Jerade. It dealt with the themes of the impermanence of life and the loss of a state of natural innocence. Like most of Jerade's work, it had no assigned title, and was referred to simply by its first line.

Tirien Kal-Di, who lived millennia after Jerade, was sufficiently familiar with the text of the poem to quote it from memory.

Text
The text of the poem was:


 * I walked one evening through a garden green,
 * A wretched day remained upon my mind,
 * As o'er the wall the twilight's dwindling rays
 * A path illumined for me through the sedge.
 * Yet cares beset me still in Nature's court;
 * Her simple courtiers did not assuage,
 * And as I walked I crushéd underfoot
 * The loathsome grass and overweening weeds.
 * But as I sighed, I saw 'midst leaf and stem
 * A flower, gilded, gleaming. Rare and fine
 * Its petals shone in rays of dying light.
 * I breathed, and breath was honey-coated bliss;
 * I touched with trembling hand and silk caressed
 * My stony skin, awak'ning nerves to sing
 * A hymn so long forgotten as, entombed
 * In steel and glass I saw a world remote.
 * And by a single, fragile stem my flow'r
 * Affixéd was, and so I begged the breeze,
 * "With airy finger liberate that bloom!"
 * And if that breeze defied, well, fingers too
 * Had I to snap that fragile stem and free
 * My flower, bearing beauty home with me.
 * I reached, but, to my sorrow, paused again
 * At silken touch, and as I sighed, the sun
 * Sank past the wall, and darkness, thief of thieves,
 * Despoiled the gold from my beloved's face,
 * And stabbed her beauty, leaving, pale and wan,
 * A likeness of her well-preservéd corpse.
 * Oh, could I now return to turn my face
 * And never see that flower glow in bloom,
 * Or from that garden turn my steps away
 * And so unlearn what I was cursed to see!
 * I saw a flow'r, once fallen, blooms no more
 * Its incense never scents again the air.
 * It snatches but a moment ere its charms
 * And beauty fade except in memory.

Appearances

 * A Flow'r, Once Fallen