Song 1 Poem by Bessie Rayner Parkes

I LOVE to lie
In the dreamy heat of an autumn day,
Where the painted insects idly play,
Floating about in the noontide ray;
Or at evening hours
By the gilly-flower on the old grey wall,
And the scented pea, and the sun-flower tall,
And the ivy training over them all,
In the time of flowers.

By the deep old moat where the duckweed grows,
And the drowsy streamlet scarcely flows,
Overhung with garlands of gay wild rose
And bryony,
Where mosses carpet each sloping mound,
And the white convolvulus twineth round
The cluster'd shrubs and over the ground,
I love to lie;

Where all is still, and warm, and bright,
Or glowing with a chasten'd light,
Which fades away in a moonlit night,
In every time
Ere the death of the flowers, while the wandering breeze
Whispers and laughs 'mid the crowned trees,
To the song of the birds and the hum of the bees
I would lie and rhyme.