Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern and today's

Thursday, May 28th, 2020. Today's poem is by an English author and poet, Edith Nesbitt, also known as

E. Nesbitt. She wrote quite a bit of children's literature, more than 60 books, and he's probably

most famous for books like

the railway children, the story of the treasure seekers, and five children in it. But she was also

a poet. And the poem that I'm going to read today is in keeping with the garden week here on the

daily poem. It's called The Despot, and I'm getting it from the folio book of children's poetry,

which I have mentioned before on this podcast.

It goes like this.

The garden mold was damp and chill.

Winter had had his brutal wills since over all the years content his devastating legions

went. Then spring's bright banners came. There woke millions of little growing folk who

thrilled to know the winter done, gave thanks, and strove towards the sun.

Not so the elect, reserved and slow to trust a stranger's son and grow.

They hesitated, coward, and hid waiting to see what others did.

Yet even they, a little grew, put out prim leaves to day and dew and lifted level formal heads in their appointed

garden beds. The gardener came. He coldly loved the flowers that lived as he approved, that duly

decorously grew as he the despot meant them to. He saw the wildlings flower more brave and bright than any cultured slave,

yet since he had not set them there, he hated them for being fair.

So he uprooted, one by one, the free things that had loved the sun, the happy, eager, fruitful seeds,

that had not known that they were weeds.

This poem reminds me of a comet that Wendell Berry once made

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