The Wild Honey Suckle

by Philip Freneau

Fair flower, that dost so comely¹ grow,

Hid in this silent,dull retreat,

Untouched thy honeyed blossoms blow,

Unseen thy little branches greet:

No roving foot shall crush thee here,

No busy hand provoke a tear.

By Nature's self in white arrayed,

She bade thee shun² the vulger eye,

And planted here the guardian³ shade,

And sent soft waters murmuring by;

Thus quietly thy summer goes,

Thy days declining to repose⁴.

Smit with those chams,that must decay,

I grieve to see your future doom⁵;

They died--nor were those flowers more gay,

The flowers that did in Eden bloom;

Unpitying frosts,and Autumn's power

Shall leave no vestige⁶ of this flower.

From morning suns and evening dews

At first thy little being came:

If nothing once,you nothing lose,

For when you die you are the same;

The space between,is but an hour,

The frail⁷ duration of flower.

In this poem the poet expressed a keen awareness⁸ of the loveliness and transience of nature.1.He not only meditated⁹ on mortality but also celebrated¹⁰ nature.It implies that life and death are inevitable¹¹ law of nature, "the wild honey suckle"is Philip Freneau's most widely read natureal lyric¹² with the theme of transience.2.The poem express the poet's view about the writing material of American writors.In the author's opinion, the origin land in America was fiiled with beauty and myth,which could compete with the rilics of Europ.It revealed on the basis of American beauty, the American writor can produce good works.

The central image is a nativewild flower,which makes a drastic difference from elite¹³ flower images typical of tradition english poems. The poem showed strong feelings for the natural beauty,which was the characteristic of romantic poets.

The poem was written in regular 6-line tetrameter stanzas,rhyming:ababcc .The structure of the poem is regular,so it has the neoclassic quality of proportion and balance. Alliteration¹⁴ ,assonance,masculine rhyme used in the poem also produce musical or melodious¹⁵ and harmonious,which matches the beautyof the flower,the beauty of poem is partly ambodied in the effects created through changes in the rhythm. The poem contains iambics trochaics and spondee. The arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables¹⁶ suggests the transience of the life of the flower and the poet's emotional change.the poem is full of sensuous¹⁷ images such as fair flower visual image,comely grow kinasthetic image and honeyed blossoms olfactory¹⁸ image.All the images make us feel pity for the beautiful flower which has only a short life. The line"the sapace is but an hour"contains a hyperbole stressing and transience of life. The tone of the poem is both sentimental¹⁹ and optimistic.