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| BUY my English posies! | |
| Kent and Surrey May— | |
| Violets of the Undercliff | |
| Wet with Channel spray; | |
| Cowslips from a Devon combe— | 5 |
| Midland, furze afire— | |
| Buy my English posies | |
| And I’ll sell your heart’s desire! | |
| |
| Buy my English posies! | |
| You that scorn the May, | 10 |
| Won’t you greet a friend from home | |
| Half the world away? | |
| Green against the draggled drift, | |
| Faint and frail and first— | |
| Buy my Northern blood-root | 15 |
| And I’ll know where you were nursed: | |
| Robin down the logging-road whistles, ‘Come to me!’ | |
| Spring has found the maple-grove, the sap is running free; | |
| All the winds of Canada call the ploughing-rain. | |
| Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again! | 20 |
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| Buy my English posies! | |
| Here ’s to match your need— | |
| Buy a tuft of royal heath, | |
| Buy a bunch of weed | |
| White as sand of Muysenberg | 25 |
| Spun before the gale— | |
| Buy my heath and lilies | |
| And I’ll tell you whence you hail! | |
| Under hot Constantia broad the vineyards lie— | |
| Throned and thorn’d the aching berg props the speckless sky— | 30 |
| Slow below the Wynberg firs trails the tilted wain— | |
| Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again! | |
| |
| Buy my English posies! | |
| You that will not turn— | |
| Buy my hot-wood clematis, | 35 |
| Buy a frond o’ fern | |
| Gather’d where the Erskine leaps | |
| Down the road to Lorne— | |
| Buy my Christmas creeper | |
| And I’ll say where you were born! | 40 |
| West away from Melbourne dust holidays begin— | |
| They that mock at Paradise woo at Cora Lynn— | |
| Through the great South Otway gums sings the great South Main— | |
| Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again! | |
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| Buy my English posies! | 45 |
| Here ’s your choice unsold! | |
| Buy a blood-red myrtle-bloom, | |
| Buy the kowhai’s gold | |
| Flung for gift on Taupo’s face, | |
| Sign that spring is come— | 50 |
| Buy my clinging myrtle | |
| And I’ll give you back your home! | |
| Broom behind the windy town; pollen o’ the pine— | |
| Bell-bird in the leafy deep where the ratas twine— | |
| Fern above the saddle-bow, flax upon the plain— | 55 |
| Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again! | |
| |
| Buy my English posies! | |
| Ye that have your own | |
| Buy them for a brother’s sake | |
| Overseas, alone. | 60 |
| Weed ye trample underfoot | |
| Floods his heart abrim— | |
| Bird ye never heeded, | |
| O, she calls his dead to him! | |
| Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas; | 65 |
| Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these! | |
| Unto each his mother-beach, bloom and bird and land— | |
| Masters of the Seven Seas, O, love and understand! | |
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