Beautiful Ferns - Catherine Richardson

Beautiful, delicate, fairy-like things!

Ye bend where the forest its deep shadow flings—

Where the long dank weeds weep their dews all day,

And there falls not a sunbeam to chase them away.

As the pale calm nuns, with their heads bowed low,

In the long procession move sad and slow,

While ever the low and quick-chanted hymn,

Floats through the long aisle strange and dim;

So seem ye to bow by the rivulet’s banks,

While its soft murmurs float through your solemn ranks

In the forest’s dim twilight, cold and grey,

Like a chanted hymn to the dying day.

Above, like a canopy, silvered and green,

Wave the feathery plumes of your graceful Queen;

And frail dark fronds with their netted roots,

And the ring-like curl of their delicate shoots,

O’erwrought as with many a fairy-like gem,

As drapery hang round her fibrous stem.

Ye bear the faint perfume of dying leaves

That fell around ye from branching eaves

An your long, brown roots, with their knotted knees,

Clasp the dead trunks of the mouldering trees;

Your green pull covering the mournful dead,

As memory bellows the days long fled:

So drooping, so lovely! frail, delicate things,

Ye are emblems of thought, when its folding wings

Droop earthward, and mourn o’er the cold, dead past,

And the sin-burdened soul, with her eyes downcast,

Pondering o’er things that shall be no more,

Weeps penitent tears for the days of yore.

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Catherine H. Richardson (858—1878) New Zealand

Source: Australian poets, 1788-1888; by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen, Giffuith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh, 1888