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Home  »  Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century  »  Frances Anne Kemble (1809–1893)

Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.

By Poems. XVI. “Cover Me with Your Everlasting Arms”

Frances Anne Kemble (1809–1893)

COVER me with your everlasting arms,

Ye guardian giants of this solitude!

From the ill-sight of men, and from the rude,

Tumultuous din of yon wild world’s alarms!

Oh, knit your mighty limbs around, above,

And close me in for ever! let me dwell

With the wood spirits, in the darkest cell

That ever with your verdant locks ye wove.

The air is full of countless voices, joined

In one eternal hymn; the whispering wind,

The shuddering leaves, the hidden water-springs,

The work-song of the bees, whose honeyed wings

Hang in the golden tresses of the lime,

Or buried lie in purple beds of thyme.