Flower God, God of the Spring

20 lines

Robert Louis Stevenson·1850–1894·Lyric·Victorian

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Summary Meaning

Stevenson's poem meditates on the tension between natural renewal and personal loss, as the speaker invokes the Flower God to restore spring's vitality while acknowledging that the beloved's absence renders such regeneration hollow. The Flower God functions as a symbol of cyclical rebirth and impersonal natural fecundity, which contrasts starkly with the irreplaceable singularity of human love. Philosophically, the poem explores the limits of nature's consolation, suggesting that divine or natural forces cannot remedy the existential wound of grief. Its tone is simultaneously reverent and plaintive, blending classical apostrophe with a modern sensibility of melancholic resignation.

LOWER god, god of the spring, beautiful, bountiful,

Cold-dyed shield in the sky, lover of versicles,

Here I wander in April

Cold, grey-headed; and still to my

Heart, Spring comes with a bound, Spring the deliverer,

Spring, song-leader in woods, chorally resonant;

Spring, flower-planter in meadows,

Child-conductor in willowy

Fields deep dotted with bloom, daisies and crocuses:

Here that child from his heart drinks of eternity:

O child, happy are children!

She still smiles on their innocence,

She, dear mother in God, fostering violets,

Fills earth full of her scents, voices and violins:

Thus one cunning in music

Wakes old chords in the memory:

Thus fair earth in the Spring leads her performances.

One more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal

Green - one more, and my bosom

Feels new life with an ecstasy.

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