Alas, poor world, what treasure hast thou lost! What face remains alive that's worth the viewing? Whose tongue is music now? What can'st thou boast Of things long since, or any thing ensuing? The flowers are sweet, their colors fresh and trim, But true sweet beauty lived and died with him.
In her ecstacy of grief she prophecies that henceforth all sorts of sorrows shall be attendants upon love,--and alas! she was too correct an oracle.
The course of true love never does run smooth.
Here is Shakespeare's version of the metamorphosis of Adonis into a flower.
By this the boy that by her side lay killed Was melted into vapour from her sight, And in his blood that on the ground lay spilled, A purple flower sprang up, checquered with white, Resembling well his pale cheeks, and the blood Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood.
She bows her head, the new sprung flower to smell, Comparing it to her Adonis' breath, And says, within her bosom it shall dwell Since he himself is reft from her by death; She crops the stalk, and in the branch appears Green dropping sap which she compares to tears.
The reader may like to contrast this account of the change from human into floral beauty with the version of the same story in Ovid as translated by Eusden.
Then on the blood sweet nectar she bestows, The scented blood in little bubbles rose; Little as rainy drops, which fluttering fly, Borne by the winds, along a lowering sky, Short time ensued, till where the blood was shed, A flower began to rear its purple head
Such, as on Punic apples is revealed Or in the filmy rind but half concealed, Still here the fate of lonely forms we see, _So sudden fades the sweet Anemone_. The feeble stems to stormy blasts a prey Their sickly beauties droop, and pine away The winds forbid the flowers to flourish long Which owe to winds their names in Grecian song.
The concluding couplet alludes to the Grecian name of the flower ([Greek: anemos], _anemos_, the wind.)
It is said of the Anemone that it never opens its lips until Zephyr kisses them. Sir William Jones alludes to its short-lived beauty.
Youth, like a thin anemone, displays His silken leaf, and in a morn decays.
The coy anemone that ne'er discloses Her lips until they're blown on by the wind