Mary Tighe

Mary Tighe Poems

How wither'd, perish'd, seems the form
Of yon obscure unsightly root!
Yet from the blight of wintry storm
It hides secure the precious fruit.
...

Oh happy you! who blest with present bliss
See not with fatal prescience future tears,
Nor the dear moment of enjoyment miss
...

Preface.

Let not the rugged brow the rhymes accuse,
Which speak of gentle knights and ladies fair,
...

Oh, who art thou who darest of Love complain?
He is a gentle spirit and injures none!
His foes are ours; from them the bitter pain,
...

Delightful visions of my lonely hours!
Charm of my life and solace of my care!
Oh! would the muse but lend proportioned powers,
...

When pleasure sparkles in the cup of youth,
And the gay hours on downy wing advance,
Oh! then ‘tis sweet to hear the lip of truth
...

Mary Tighe Biography

Mary Tighe (née Blackford or Blanchford[1]) (October 9, 1772 – March 24, 1810), was an Anglo-Irish poet. She was born in Dublin to Theodosia Tighe, a Methodist leader, and William Blachford (d.1772), a Church of Ireland clergyman and librarian. She had a strict religious upbringing, and when she was twenty-one she married Henry Tighe (1768–1836), her first cousin and a member of the Parliament of Ireland for Inistioge, County Kilkenny. The marriage is said to have been unhappy, though little is known. The couple moved to London and Tighe became acquainted with Thomas Moore and others interested in literature. Although she had written since girlhood, she published nothing until Psyche (1805), a six-canto allegorical poem in Spenserian stanzas. Having suffered from tuberculosis for some years, Tighe spent the last months of her life an invalid and died in 1810. Her diary was destroyed, though a cousin copied out excerpts. The year following her death a new edition of Psyche was released, along with some previously unpublished poems; it was this edition that established her literary reputation. John Keats was one of her admirers and paid tribute to her in his poem, "To Some Ladies." Pam Perkins writes that "[d]espite the bleakness of many of the short poems in the 1811 volume, in much of the nineteenth-century writing on Tighe there is a tendency to make her an exemplar of patiently (and picturesquely) long-suffering femininity, a tendency exemplified most famously in Felicia Hemans's tribute to her, 'The Grave of a Poetess.'')

The Best Poem Of Mary Tighe

The Lily

How wither'd, perish'd, seems the form
Of yon obscure unsightly root!
Yet from the blight of wintry storm
It hides secure the precious fruit.

The careless eye can find no grace,
No beauty in the scaly folds,
Nor see within the dark embrace
What latent loveliness it holds.

Yet in that bulb, those sapless scales
The lily wraps her silver vest,
Till vernal suns and vernal gales
Shall kiss once more her fragrant breast.

Yes, hide beneath the mould'ring heap,
The undelighting slighted thing;
There in the cold earth buried deep,
In silence let it wait the spring.

Oh! many a stormy night shall close
In gloom upon the barren earth,
While still in undisturb'd repose,
Uninjur'd lies the future birth.

And ignorance, with sceptic eye,
Hope's patient smile shall wond'ring view;
Or mock her fond credulity,
As her soft tears the spot bedew;

Sweet smile of hope, delicious tear,
The sun, the show'r indeed shall come
The promised verdant shoot appear,
And nature bid her blossoms bloom.

And thou, O virgin queen of spring,
Shalt from thy dark and lowly bed,
Bursting thy green sheath's silken string,
Unveil thy charms, and perfume shed;

Unfold thy robes of purest white,
Unsullied from their darksome grave,
And thy soft petals' flow'ry light,
In the mild breeze unfett'd wave.

So faith shall seek the lowly dust,
Where humble sorrow loves to lie,
And bid her thus her hopes intrust,
And watch with patient, cheerful eye;

And bear the long, cold, wintry night,
And bear her own degraded doom,
And wait till heav'n's reviving light,
Eternal spring! shall burst the gloom.

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