野金银花

The Wild Honey-Suckle 野金银花

By Philip Freneau

Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,

Hid in this silent, dull retreat,

美丽的金银花，

你粲然绽放于幽静一角。

Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,

芳菲满枝，无人垂顾，

Unseen thy little branches greet;

迎风起舞，无人注目。

...No roving foot shall crush thee here,

游子从不践踏你的玉体，

...No busy hand provoke a tear.

过客从不催落你的泪滴。

By Nature's self in white arrayed,

造化令你素裹银妆，

She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,

你得以远离庸人的目光。

And planted here the gaurdian shade,

她赐予你一片绿阴葱葱，

And sent soft waters murmuring by;

她带给你一泓流水淙淙。

...Thus quietly thy summer goes,

恬静的夏日倏然流淌，

...Thy days declinging to repose.

你终于红衰翠减，玉陨香消。

Smit with those charms, that must decay,

妩媚动人，你却无法盛颜久长，

I grieve to see your future doom;

落红满地，你令我黯然神伤。

They died--nor were those flowers more gay, 纵然在伊甸乐园，人间天堂，

The flowers that did in Eden bloom;

也难免一日凋零，满目凄凉。

...Unpitying frosts, and Autumn's power

萧瑟秋风，凄白秋霜，

...Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

你终于消失得无影无踪。

From morning suns and evenign dews

朝霞暮露，

At first thy little being came:

孕育了你娇小的身躯。

If nothing once, you nothing lose,

你从尘土来，又归尘土去，

For when you die you are the same;

来时一无所有，去时化作尘土，

...The space between, is but an hour,

可叹生命苦短，

...The frail duration of a flower.

你终究红消香断。

The poet describes his thoughts to readers on the themes of life and death in the form of a blooming flower of life.In this poem the poet expressed a keen awareness of the loveliness and transience of nature.1.He not only meditated on mortality but also celebrated nature.It implies that life and death are inevitable law of nature, "the wild honey suckle"is Philip Freneau's most widely read natureal lyric with the theme of transience.2.The poem express the poet's view about the writing material of American writors.In the author's opinion, the origin land in America was fiiled with beauty and myth,which could compete with the rilics of Europ.It revealed on the basis of American beauty, the American writor can produce good works.

The central image is a nativewild flower,which makes a drastic difference from elite flower images typical of tradition english poems. The poem showed strong feelings for the natural beauty,which was the characteristic of romantic poets.

The poem was written in regular 6-line tetrameter stanzas,rhyming:ababcc .The structure of the poem is regular,so it has the neoclassic quality of proportion and balance. Alliteration ,assonance,masculine rhyme used in the poem also produce musical or melodious and harmonious,which matches the beautyof the flower,the beauty of poem is partly ambodied in the effects created through changes in the rhythm. The poem contains iambics trochaics and spondee. The arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables suggests the transience of the life of the flower and the poet's emotional change.the poem is full of sensuous images such as fair flower visual image,comely grow kinasthetic image and honeyed blossoms olfactory image.All the images make us feel pity for the beautiful flower which has only a short life. The line"the sapace is but an hour"contains a hyperbole stressing and transience of life. The tone of the poem is both sentimental and optimistic.