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| OH, grieve not, Ladies, if at night | |
| Ye wake to feel your beauty going. | |
| It was a web of frail delight, | |
| Inconstant as an April snowing. | |
| |
| In other eyes, in other lands, | 5 |
| In deep fair pools, new beauty lingers, | |
| But like spent water in your hands | |
| It runs from your reluctant fingers. | |
| |
| Ye shall not keep the singing lark | |
| That owes to earlier skies its duty. | 10 |
| Weep not to hear along the dark | |
| The sound of your departing beauty. | |
| |
| The fine and anguished ear of night | |
| Is tuned to hear the smallest sorrow. | |
| Oh, wait until the morning light! | 15 |
| It may not seem so gone to-morrow! | |
| |
| But honey-pale and rosy-red! | |
| Brief lights that made a little shining! | |
| Beautiful looks about us shed— | |
| They leave us to the old repining. | 20 |
| |
| Think not the watchful dim despair | |
| Has come to you the first, sweet-hearted! | |
| For oh, the gold in Helen’s hair! | |
| And how she cried when that departed! | |
| |
| Perhaps that one that took the most, | 25 |
| The swiftest borrower, wildest spender, | |
| May count, as we would not, the cost— | |
| And grow more true to us and tender. | |
| |
| Happy are we if in his eyes | |
| We see no shadow of forgetting. | 30 |
| Nay—if our star sinks in those skies | |
| We shall not wholly see its setting. | |
| |
| Then let us laugh as do the brooks | |
| That such immortal youth is ours, | |
| If memory keeps for them our looks | 35 |
| As fresh as are the spring-time flowers. | |
| |
| Oh, grieve not, Ladies, if at night | |
| Ye wake, to feel the cold December! | |
| Rather recall the early light | |
| And in your loved one’s arms, remember. | 40 |
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