Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf

Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf is Rennell Rodd's refined lyric collection, introduced by Oscar Wilde and shaped by a graceful, classical sensibility. Across its poems, ruined Rome, Mediterranean shores, churches, graves, and mythic figures become sites of meditation on love, memory, mortality, faith, and the passing of seasons. The opening elegies linger over vanished grandeur, broken relics, and the persistence of the dead in landscape and legend, while later poems deepen the book's intimate, reflective mood through conversations on belief and art, contrasts between pagan memory and Christian ritual, and visions of longing that outlast loss. The volume moves between historical imagination and personal sorrow, from Augustus mourning a child to Actea's fierce devotion to Nero, and from autumn fields and falling leaves to dreamlike encounters with Endymion and other symbolic figures. Throughout, beauty is inseparable from grief: the poems seek consolation in recollection, ritual, and the hope of reunion beyond death, even as they acknowledge disillusion and the mystery of what lies beyond. A final note on the book's publication history underscores its rarity, craftsmanship, and literary associations. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.