Au Jardin
Au Jardin - meaning Summary
Playful Melancholy Under Moonlight
The poem presents a speaker addressing a distant woman from below the pines, mixing playful courtship with rueful observation. He claims only songs to offer and frames life as superficially gay yet liable to sorrow. Repeated lines about a jester in the garden underline a performance or mask. Memories of a danced, elusive love suggest fleeting desire and a resigned, almost comic acceptance of inevitable loss.
Read Complete AnalysesO you away high there, you that lean From amber lattices upon the cobalt night, I am below amid the pine trees, Amid the little pine trees, hear me! 'The jester walked in the garden.' Did he so? Well, there's no use your loving me That way, Lady; For I've nothing but songs to give you. I am set wide upon the world's ways To say that life is, some way, a gay thing, But you never string two days upon one wire But there'll come sorrow of it. And I loved a love once, Over beyond the moon there, I loved a love once, And, may be, more times, But she danced like a pink moth in the shrubbery. Oh, I know you women from the 'other folk', And it'll all come right, O' Sundays. 'The jester walked in the garden.' Did he so?
Feel free to be first to leave comment.