All early in the April, when daylight comes at five,

I went into the garden most glad to be alive;

The thrushes and the blackbirds were singing in the thorn,

The April flowers were singing for joy of being born.

I smelt the dewy morning come blowing through the woods

Where all the wilding cherries do toss their snowy snoods;

I thought of the running water where sweet white violets grow.

I said: “I’ll pick them for her; because she loves them so.”

So in the dewy morning I turned to climb the hill,

Beside the running water whose tongue is never still.

Oh, delicate green and dewy were all the budding trees;

The blue dog-violets grew there, and many primroses.

Out of the wood I wandered, but paused upon the heath

To watch, beyond the tree-tops, the wrinkled sea beneath;

Its blueness and its stillness were trembling as it lay

In the old un-autumned beauty that never goes away.

And the beauty of the water brought my love into my mind,

Because all sweet love is beauty, and the loved thing turns to kind;

And I thought, “It is a beauty spread for setting of your grace,

O white violet of a woman with the April in your face.”

So I gathered the white violets where young men pick them still,

And I turned to cross the woodland to her house beneath the hill,

And I thought of her delight in the flowers that I brought her,

Bright like sunlight, sweet like singing, cool like running of the water.