The city once again doth wear <br />Her wonted dress of winter's bride, <br />Her mantle woven of misty air, <br />With saffron sunlight faintly dyed. <br />She sits above the seething tide, <br />Of all her summer robes forlorn - <br />And dead is all her summer pride - <br />The leaves are off Queen Mary's Thorn. <br /> <br />All round, the landscape stretches bare, <br />The bleak fields lying far and wide, <br />Monotonous, with here and there <br />A lone tree on a lone hillside. <br />No more the land is glorified <br />With golden gleams of ripening corn, <br />Scarce is a cheerful hue descried - <br />The leaves are off Queen Mary's Thorn. <br /> <br />For me, I do not greatly care <br />Though leaves be dead, and mists abide. <br />To me the place is thrice as fair <br />In winter as in summer-tide: <br />With kindlier memories allied <br />Of pleasure past and pain o'erworn. <br />What care I, though the earth may hide <br />The leaves from off Queen Mary's Thorn? <br /> <br />Thus I unto my friend replied, <br />When, on a chill late autumn morn, <br />He pointed to the tree, and cried, <br />`The leaves are off Queen Mary's Thorn!'<br /><br />Robert Fuller Murray<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/winter-at-st-andrews/
