[This poem was written on a sheet of paper wrapped round a bunch of violets, tied loosely with a straw, and thrown into the window of a friend. It was read at Thoreau's funeral by his friend Bronson Alcott.]

'It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a richer ere this. I have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself.'—The Week.

***

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
⁠By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
⁠Were made so loose and wide,
⁠Methinks,
For milder weather.

A bunch of violets without their roots,
⁠And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
⁠Once coiled about their shoots,
⁠The law
⁠By which I'm fixed.

A nosegay which Time clutched from out
⁠Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
⁠Doth make the rabble rout
⁠That waste
⁠The day he yields.

And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
⁠Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
⁠To keep my branches green,
⁠But stand
⁠In a bare cup.

Some tender buds were left upon my stem
⁠In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
⁠Till time has withered them,
⁠The woe
⁠With which they're rife.

But now I see I was not plucked for nought,
⁠And after in life's vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
⁠But by a kind hand brought
⁠Alive
⁠To a strange place.

That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
⁠And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
⁠More fruits and fairer flowers
⁠Will bear,
⁠While I droop here.