12. Vere Novo

How the morning laughs upon the weeping roses!
Oh! charming little lovers that the flower possesses!
It is only in the jasmines, only in periwinkles
That this dazzling display of wild white twinkles
Coming and going, that come back shuttering,
Reopening, in one vast and gentle fluttering.
O spring! When one thinks of all the billets doux
From dreamy lovers to pensive beauties, who
Entrusted to paper their hearts, of those heaps
Of letters penned on taffeta-fine sheets,
Of messages of love, intoxication gay,
Received in April and torn up in May—
Imagine them flying away, at the glad wind’s whim,
In meadows, woods, water, to the very skies’ rim,
And roaming everywhere, seeking a soul,
Running to the flower upon leaving the girl,
The little white fragments the winds scatters fly,
Of all the love notes that become butterflies.

May 1831