When I am dead, withhold, I pray, your blooming legacy;
Beneath the willows did I bide, and they should cover me;
I longed for light and fragrance, and I sought them far and near,
O, it would grieve me utterly, to find them on my bier!
The speaker asks that no flowers be laid on her grave. She has lived beneath willows, and she wants those same branches to cover her in death. All her life she longed for light and fragrance—for beauty, comfort, perhaps tenderness—and she searched for them far and near, but she seems never to have…
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