UNDER the snow in the dark and the cold
A pale little tendril was humming;
Sweetly it sang, 'neath the frozen mold
Of the beautiful days that were coming.
"How foolish your songs," said a lump of clay;
"What is there, I ask, to prove them?
Just look at the walls between you and the day--
How can you have power to remove them?"
But under the ice and under the snow
The pale little sprout kept singing,
"I cannot tell how, but I know, I know--
I know what the days are bringing;
"Birds and blossoms and buzzing bees,
Blue, blue skies above me;
Bloom on the meadow, and buds on the trees,
And the great, glad sun to love me."
Then a pebble spoke up: "You are quite absurd,"
It said, "with your song's insistence;
For I never saw a tree or a bird,
So of course there are none in existence."
But "I know, I know," the tendril cried
In beautiful, sweet unreason,
Till lo, from its prison glorified
It burst in the glad spring season!
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Munseys Monthly 12 (March 1895): 588.
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