How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers of spring;

To which, beside their own demean,

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

Grief melts away

Like snow in May,

As if there were no such thing.

Who would have thought my shrivelled heart

Could have recovered greenness? It was gone

Quite underground; as flowers depart

To see their mother root, when they have blown;

Where they together

All the hard weather,

Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

These are thy wonders, Lord of power,

Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell

And up to heaven in an hour;

Making a chiming of a passing-bell.

We say amiss,

This or that is:

Thy word is all, if we could spell.

O that I once once past changing were,

Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!…

And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write:

I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing: O my only light,

It cannot be

That I am he

On whom thy tempests fell all night….

George Herbert (1593-1633)