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| ROSE de Sens, I saw you blooming | |
| By the gray cathedral door, | |
| When the shadows of the morning | |
| Fell athwart the marble floor; | |
| And the marketwomen softly | 5 |
| Up the pillared aisles did pass, | |
| With their caps as white as snowdrift, | |
| On their way to early Mass. | |
| |
| But the pavement of the market | |
| Was alight with every hue | 10 |
| Which the darling flowers could muster, | |
| As they trimmed their lamps anew! | |
| ’T was an early day in April | |
| When I bought the precious thing; | |
| But the beauty of the blossoms | 15 |
| Made a summer of the spring! | |
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| Rose de Sens, we bore you softly, | |
| As the sunnier days came on, | |
| Far from your native meadows, | |
| In the valley of the Yonne; | 20 |
| From the turret, slim and dainty, | |
| Which the wheeling swallows haunt; | |
| From the mighty, massive minster, | |
| With its slow Gregorian chant; | |
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| From the adamantine causeway, | 25 |
| With its mosses overgrown; | |
| From the yellow, perfumed wallflower, | |
| Set in crannies of the stone; | |
| From the fragments of the ramparts, | |
| Half of Rome and half of Gaul, | 30 |
| Which beat back the foes of Clovis | |
| From their vast embattled wall; | |
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| From the poplars on the island, | |
| In the broad, unburdened stream, | |
| Where the English exile, Thomas, | 35 |
| May have dreamed prophetic dream | |
| Of those distant Kentish meadows, | |
| Where, at scarce a later day, | |
| His own tomb should be the altar, | |
| Where half Europe flocked to pray. | 40 |
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| I have put you in my garden | |
| On the hills above the Seine, | |
| Where many dainty roses | |
| Drink their fill of summer rain; | |
| But whatever be their beauty | 45 |
| Or how rare soe’er they be, | |
| There ’s not a rose among them | |
| That can tell your tale to me! | |
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