These are the gardens of the desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name—
The prairies.

William Cullen Bryant’s lines come from his early nature poem “The Prairies,” written after secondhand accounts and popular descriptions of the American West had begun to circulate widely in the early 19th century. Bryant, a leading figure of American Romanticism, often sought to define a distinctly American landscape and sensibility in poetry. In this passage he pauses to name—and to stress the difficulty of naming—the vast grasslands newly prominent in the U.S. imagination. The remark that “the speech of England has no name” underscores both the novelty of the prairie to British/European experience and Bryant’s larger project of giving literary form to American scenery.

The speaker marvels at the prairie’s paradoxical character: it is “desert” in its treeless openness yet also a “garden” in its richness and beauty. Calling the grasslands “unshorn fields” emphasizes their natural, uncultivated abundance—an immense landscape that resembles farmland but exceeds human scale and control. The claim that English lacks a word for it turns geography into cultural argument: the New World contains forms that inherited language cannot fully capture. The passage thus celebrates the prairie as a symbol of American distinctiveness while also highlighting how language, shaped by history and place, can lag behind new environments.