The Melody of Earth: An Anthology of Garden and Nature Poems From Present-Day Poets

How many of us are conscious of the subtle melodies, "through which the myriad lispings of the earth find perfect speech"? Our poets are listeners; their ears are tuned to the magic call of secret voices that we who are not singers may never hear. They capture the "Melody" in chalices of song, and their message is: that whosoever will bend his ear to earth, may hear from field and furrow, from the many-bladed grass and the soft-petalled flowers—in the soughing of the pine tree or the rustle of leaves—an immortal music that revivifies the soul. In the quiet tilled spots of earth, from time immemorial, men have sown rare seeds of poetic thought that have flowered into song. Amiel wrote in his Journal: "All seed-sowing is a mysterious thing whether the seed fall into earth or into souls; man is a husbandman, and his work rightly understood is to develop life, to sow it everywhere." The poets are our seed-sowers, and their work is to develop life and to enrich it. They are never happier than when writing about gardens and the growing things of earth—at once their symbol and their solace. In turn gardens have in the poets their happiest interpreters. Here I have culled and gathered together songs and poems that reflect the melody and harmony of Nature's forces. In these days of the world's travail, let us seek inspiration and content within the delightful confines of these Gardens of Poetry. Gertrude Moore RichardsMarch, 1918