A speaker leads a beloved through spring’s returned flowers, light, and budding branches. She offers pink, white, and yellow blossoms, and points to silver “fairy money” scattered on the grass. Her invitation feels both eager and mournful, as if every lovely detail carries an undercurrent of goodbye. Then the mood shifts: she refuses to give moss, calls a pale hyacinth “not for you,” and asks her lover to swear never to find where it grew. This withholding suggests a wound or secret at the heart of their sorrowful love. The speaker feels outside the season’s energy—her fingers are cold—and she wonders if they can ever be happy or playful again. The final “In vain—in vain! Come away!” is tender and desperate. Spring’s beauty is everywhere, but it sharpens loss instead of healing it. The overall mood is intimate, elegiac: aching, fragile, and quietly tormented.
Sorrowing Love — Summary
And again the flowers are come And the light shakes, And no tiny voice is dumb, And a bud breaks On the humble bush and the proud restless tree. Come with me!
Look, this little flower is pink, And this one white. Here’s a pearl cup for your drink, Here’s for your delight A yellow one, sweet with honey, Here’s fairy money Silver bright Scattered over the grass As we pass.
Here’s moss. How the smell of it lingers On my cold fingers! You shall have no moss. Here’s a frail Hyacinth, deathly pale. Not for you, not for you! And the place where they grew You must promise me not to discover, My sorrowful lover! Shall we never be happy again? Never again play? In vain--in vain! Come away!