A ruined cottage disappears into the woods, and all that’s left are plants and a few shattered pieces of old blue plates. The speaker doesn’t mourn openly—there’s a quiet, almost tender acceptance here. Periwinkle vines creep over where walls used to be, their flowers tangled like bits of memory. Even when the real blossoms fade, something else keeps the story alive: the painted flowers on those blue shards, scattered in the bank. They feel “everlasting,” holding onto a domestic past that nature has otherwise swallowed. The mood is wistful but not despairing. It’s as if the speaker finds a small comfort in how these fragile scraps still whisper of meals, conversations, a home. Loss and persistence mingle in the image of a weed threading through broken china—sad, yet strangely settled, like a tale that keeps telling itself without any need for human voices.
A Tale — Summary
THERE once the walls Of the ruined cottage stood. The periwinkle crawls With flowers in its hair into the wood.
In flowerless hours Never will the bank fail, With everlasting flowers On fragments of blue plates, to tell the tale.