Volume 16:1, Winter 2015
The Sonnet Issue
The Bee
The honey-bee that wanders all day long,
The field, the woodland, and the garden o’er,
To gather in his fragrant winter store,
Humming in calm content his quiet song,
Seeks not alone the rose’s glowing breast,
The lily’s dainty cup, the violet’s lips,
But from all rank and noxious weeds he sips
The single drop of sweetness closely press’d
Within the poison chalice. Thus, if we
Seek only to draw forth the hidden sweet,
In all the varied human flowers we meet,
In the wide garden of humanity,
And like the bee, if home the spoil we bear,
Hived in our hearts it turns to nectar there.
Anne Lynch Botta (1815 -1891) lived in DC from 1850 to 1853, while serving as personal secretary to Henry Clay. She is the author of Poems (1849) and A Handbook of Universal Literature (1860, a widely used textbook), and editor of an anthology, The Rhode Island Book. Born in 1815, Botta was educated at the Albany Female Academy, and taught briefly in Albany and Providence, RI. After her sojourn in DC, she settled in New York, teaching at the Brooklyn Girls' Academy, writing freelance articles for magazines, and hosting a renowned salon in her home, frequented by some of the most famous writers of the time, including William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allen Poe, Helen Hunt Jackson, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Fanny Kemble. In middle age, she married a Dante Scholar who taught at New York University. After her death in 1891, her husband compiled her unpublished poems, along with letters and tributes, and published the posthumous Memoirs of Anne C. L. Botta: Written By Her Friends (1893). To read more by this author: Mapping the City, DC Places, Part II