Thou wast that all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine—
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
And all the flowers were mine.

These lines come from Edgar Allan Poe’s lyric poem “To One in Paradise,” a lament spoken after the loss (by death or estrangement) of an idealized beloved. Poe wrote and revised the poem in the early 1830s and it circulated in periodicals before later being gathered into his poetry collections. The speaker looks back on love as a once-enchanting refuge—an imagined “green isle” and “shrine”—now irretrievably gone. The poem fits Poe’s recurring preoccupation with beauty, memory, and bereavement, and it is often read alongside his other elegiac love poems that transform personal loss into a dreamlike, symbolic landscape.

The speaker addresses the beloved as the totality of his former emotional world: love was not merely a person but an entire sustaining environment—an island of safety, a sacred place, a source of renewal. The imagery fuses the natural (“green isle,” “fountain”) with the devotional (“shrine”), suggesting that romantic attachment has become a kind of private religion. “Fairy fruits and flowers” intensify the sense of enchantment and unreality, implying that the happiness was both exquisite and fragile. The final insistence—“all the flowers were mine”—underscores possessive intimacy and the poignancy of its loss: what once seemed wholly owned by the self is now only memory.