Sherry Chandler

Amelia Welby

Back on April 20, I posted about Amelia Welby, one of Kentucky’s early 19th century poets. Here is another of her famous poems:

The Rainbow

I sometimes have thoughts in my loneliest hours,
That lie on my heart like the dew on the flowers,
Of a ramble I took one bright afternoon,
When my heart was as light as a blossom in June;
The green earth was moist with the late fallen showers,
The breeze fluttered down and blew open the flowers,
While a single white cloud to its haven of rest,
On the white wing of peace, floated off in the west.

As I threw back my tresses to catch the cool breeze,
That scattered the raindrops and dimpled the seas,
Far up the blue sky a fair rainbow unrolled
Its soft tinted pinions of purple and gold.

‘Twas born in a moment, yet, quick as its birth,
It had stretched to the uttermost parts of the earth,
And, fair as an angel, it floated as free,
With a wing on the earth and a wing on the sea.

How calm was the ocean! How gentle its swell!
Like a woman’s soft bosom it rose and it fell;
While its light sparkling waves, stealing laughingly o’er,
When they saw the fair rainbow, knelt down on the shore.
No sweet hymn ascended, no murmur of prayer,
Yet I felt that the spirit of worship was there,
And bent my young head, in devotion and love,
‘Neath the form of an angel that floated above.

How wide was the sweep of its beautiful wings!
How boundless its circle! how radiant its rings!
If I looked on the sky, it was suspended in air;
If I looked on the ocean, the rainbow was there;
Thus forming a girdle, as brilliant and whole
As the thoughts of the rainbow that circled my soul.
Like the wing of the Diety, calmly unfurled,
It bent from the cloud and encircled the world.

There are moments, I think, when the spirit receives
Whole volumes of thought on its unwritten leaves,
When the folds of the heart in a moment unclose
Like the innermost leaves from the heart of a rose.
And thus, when the rainbow had passed from the sky,
The thoughts it awoke were too deep to pass by;
It left my full soul, like the wing of a dove,
All fluttering with pleasure and fluttering with love.

I know that each moment of rapture or pain
But shortens the link in life’s mystical chain;
I know that my form, like the bow from the wave,
Must pass from the earth and lie cold in the grave;
Yet, oh! when death’s shadows my bosom encloud,
When I shrink at the thought of the coffin and shroud,
May Hope, like the rainbow, my spirit enfold
In her beautiful pinions of purple and gold.

— Amelia Welby

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Amelia B. Welby

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Bluebells

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Thomas Holley Chivers

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