The magical time of wild hyacinths is almost over for another year. Here are two poems on the theme of blue in nature. The first is a celebrated sonnet by Keats; the second a short, and typically original, reflection by New Englander Robert Frost.

    SONNET, WRITTEN IN ANSWER TO

         A SONNET ENDING THUS:

Dark eyes are dearer far

Than those that mock the hyacinthine bell. – J H Reynolds

~

Blue! ’Tis the life of heaven, – the domain

Of Cynthia, – the wide palace of the sun, –

The tent of Hesperus, and all his train, –

The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey and dun.

Blue! ’Tis  the life of waters: – Ocean

And all its vassal streams, pools numberless,

May rage, and foam, and fret, but never can

Subside, if not to dark blue nativeness.

Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest-green,

Married to green in all the sweetest flowers, –

Forget-me-not, – the Blue Bell, ­– and, that Queen

Of secrecy, the Violet: what strange powers

Hast thou, as a mere shadow! But how great,

When in an Eye thou art, alive with fate!

         FRAGMENTARY BLUE

Why make so much of fragmentary blue

In here and there a bird, or butterfly,

Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

~

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet) –

Though some savants make earth include the sky;

And blue so far above us comes so high,

It only gives our wish for blue a whet.