The Garden

Helen Hoyt

Do not fear.
The garden is yours
And it is yours to gather the fruits
And every flower of every kind,
And to set the high wall about it
And the closed gates.
The gates of your wall no hand shall open,
Not feet shall pass,
Through all the days until your return.
Do not fear.

But soon,
Soon let it be, your coming!
For the pathways will grow desolate waiting,
The flowers say, “Our loveliness has no eyes to behold it!”
The leaves murmur all day with longing,
All night the boughs of the trees sway themselves with longing…

O Master of the Garden,
O my sun and rain and dew,
Come quickly.

This poem is in the public domain.

Helen Hoyt was born in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1887 and received her AB from Barnard College in 1909. She worked as the associate editor of Poetry magazine and authored several poetry collections, including Poems of Amis (R. J. Hoffmann, 1946); The Name of a Rose (Helen Gentry, 1931); Leaves of Wild Grape (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929); and Apples Here in My Basket (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1924).

Hoyt died in Saint Helena, California in 1972.

About Helen Hoyt

Themes

Gardens

About this Poem

“The Garden” was published in Volume 2, Number 2 of The Seven Arts in June of 1917.

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The Office Building

We kissed there in the stone entrance,
In the great cool stone mouth of the building,
Before it took you.
We kissed under the granite arches.
And then you turned and were gone
And high about and above were the hard towered walls,
The terrible weights of stone, relentless,

Helen Hoyt

1918

Desire

Once you were always calling me,
Calling me when I could not answer,
Urging me where I could not follow—
So that I wished I had been born without desire,
As a stone.

But now many days you have left me.
And in the silence I have learned your meaning.

Helen Hoyt

1917

In the Next Yard

O yes, you are very cunning,
I can see that:
Out there in the snow with your red cart
And your wooly grey coat
And those ridiculous
Little grey leggings!
Like a rabbit,
A demure brownie.
O yes, you are cunning;
But do not think you will escape your father and mother
And what your brothers are!
I know the pattern.
It will surely have you—
For all these elfish times in the snow—
As commonplace as the others,
Little grey rabbit.

Helen Hoyt

2017

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The Garden

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