By Philip Freneau

Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,

Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet;
No roving foot shall crush thee here,
No busy hand provoke a tear.

By Nature's self in white arrayed,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the gaurdian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;

Thus quietly thy summer goes,
Thy days declinging to repose.

Smit with those charms, that must decay,
I grieve to see your future doom;
They died--nor were those flowers more gay,
The flowers that did in Eden bloom;

Unpitying frosts, and Autumn's power
Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

From morning suns and evenign dews
At first thy little being came:
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same;
The space between, is but an hour,
The frail duration of a flower.

『作品简介』 

《野金银花》写于1786年。使人欣赏和描述美国自然景物，有把魅力富饶的每周安于为地上天宫的意味。该诗也表现出诗人敢于独辟蹊径、摆脱古典传统约束的勇气。

In this poem the poet expressed a keen awareness of the loveliness and transience of nature.he not only meditated on mortality but also celebrated nature.it implies that life and death are inevitable law of nature,
"the wild honey suckle"is philipfreneau's most widely read natureal lyric with the theme of transience.the central image is a nativewild flower,which makes a drastic difference from elite flower images typical of tradition english poems.
the poem showed strong feelings for the natural beauty,which was the characteristic of romantic poets.
重要部分：the poem was written in regular 6-line tetrameter stanzas,rhyming:ababcc .the structure of the poem is regular,so it has the neoclassic quality of proportion and balance.
alliteration ,assonance,masculine rhyme used in the poem also produce musical or melodious and harmonious,which matches the beautyof the flower,the beauty of poem is partly ambodied in the effects created through changes in the rhythm.
the poem contains iambics trochaics and spondee.
the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables suggests the transience of the life of the flower and the poet's emotional change.the poem is full of sensuous images such as fair flower visual image,comely grow kinasthetic image and honeyed blossoms olfactory image.all the images make us feel pity for the beautiful flower which has only a short life.
obviously the poet is sentimental,deistic optimist.
the line"the sapace is but an hour"contains a hyperbole stressing and transience of life.
the tone of the poem is both sentimental and optimistic.

Philip Freneau (1752--1832)
"Poet of the American Revolution"（美国革命诗人）
"Father of American Poetry"（美国诗歌之父）
He was the most significant poet of 18th century America.
Some of his themes and images anticipated the works of such 19th century American Romantic writers as Cooper, Emerson, Poe and Melville.
1） Works
a) The Rising Glory of America 1772 《美洲光辉的兴起》
b) The House of Night 1779, 1786 《夜之屋》
c) The British Prison Ship 1781 《英国囚船》
d) To the Memory of the Brave Americans 1781 《纪念美国勇士》
e) The Wild Honey Suckle 1786
f) The Indian Burying Ground 1788
g) The Dying Indian: Tomo Chequi 《奄奄一息的印第安人：托姆•柴吉》

2） Life
 He was born in New York.
 At 16, he entered Princeton University.
 While still an undergraduate, he wrote in collaboration with one of his friends (H.H.Brackenridge) a poem entitled “The Rising Glory of America”.
 Later he attended the War of Independence, and he was captured by British army in 1780. After being released, he published “The British Prison Ship” in 1871. In the same year, he published “To the Memory of the Brave Americans”.
 After war, he supported Jefferson, and contributed greatly to American government.
 But after 50 years old, he lived in poverty. And at last he died in a blizzard.

3） Assessment
Almost alone of his generation, he managed to peer through the pervasive
atmosphere of imitativeness, to see life around directly, to appreciate the natural scenes on the new continent and the native Indian civilization. Some of his most famous works, with their lyric quality, sensuous images and their fresh perception of nature and “noble savagery” are directly American.