Cornflowers are what I call those
gentle figures with the blue eyes,
whose quiet task, fulfilled without desire for reward,
is to impart the dew of peace (which they suck
out of their own clear souls)
upon anything they get close to;
they are completely unconscious of the jewels of feeling
they have received from heaven’s hand.
You feel so content when they are near,
as if you were walking through sown fields
breathed upon by the evening breeze,
filled with devout peace and mildness.

But ivy is what I call those
softly-spoken girls
with simple fair hair
around their gently arched eyebrows,
with brown soulful eyes like deers’
that often seem on the brink of tears,
those very tears that make them so irresistible;
without strength or self-assurance,
unadorned, their bloom hidden,
yet with inexhaustible, deep,
faithful and heartfelt feeling,
they can never of their own doing
lift themselves out of their roots,
but are born to twine themselves
lovingly around some other life.
Their whole life’s destiny
hangs on this first entwining of love,
for they belong to those rare flowers
that only blossom once.

Do you know the fairy-tale flower,
the water-lily, famous from tales of yore?
Her translucent colourless head sways
on her ethereal, slender stem,
she blooms on a reedy pond in the woods,
guarded by a lone swan encircling her,
she only reveals herself to the moonlight,
who shares her silver shimmer.
Thus she blooms, the magical sister of the stars,
as the dreamy dark moth adoringly 
yearns for her from the far edge edge of the pond,
but never attains her, however much it longs to.
Water-lily is what I call the slim maiden
with locks black as night and cheeks of alabaster,
with deep foreboding thoughts in her eyes,
as if she were a ghost held captive on earth.
When she speaks, it’s like the silvery rippling of the waves,
when she’s silent, it’s like the still foreboding of a moonlit night;
she seems to exchange glances with the stars,
whose language she is familiar with, since they share the same nature;
you can never grow tired of looking into her eyes,
fringed with silky long lashes,
and you believe, as if enchanted by blissful dread,
everything the Romantics ever dreamt of about elves.