The Garden

There is a fenceless garden overgrown
With buds and blossoms and all sort of leaves;
And once, among the roses and the sheaves,
The Gardener and I were there alone.

He led me to the plot where I had thrown
The fennel of my days on wasted ground,
And in that riot of sad weeds I found
The fruitage of a life that was my own.

My life! Ah, yes, there was my life indeed!
And there were all the lives of humankind;
And they were like a book that I could read,
Whose every leaf, miraculously signed,
Outrolled itself from Thought's eternal seed.
Love-rooted in God's garden of the mind.

-- E. A. Robinson (1869-1935) American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner