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I. THE TUBEROSE you left me yesterday | |
| Leans yellowing in the glass we set it in; | |
| It could not live when you were gone away, | |
| Poor spike of withering sweetness changed and thin. | |
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| And all the fragrance of the dying flower | 5 |
| Is grown too faint and poisoned at the source, | |
| Like passion that survives a guilty hour, | |
| To find its sweetness heavy with remorse. | |
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| What shall we do, my dear, with dying roses? | |
| Shut them in weighty tomes where none will look | 10 |
| —To wonder when the unfrequent page uncloses | |
| Who shut the wither’d blossoms in the book?— | |
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| What shall we do, my dear, with things that perish, | |
| Memory, roses, love we feel and cherish? | |
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II. Alive and white, we praised the Tuberose, | 15 |
| So sweet it fill’d the garden with its breath | |
| A spike of waxy bloom that grows and grows | |
| Until at length it blooms itself to death. | |
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| Everything dies that lives—everything dies; | |
| How shall we keep the flower we lov’d so long? | 20 |
| O press to death the transient thing we prize, | |
| Crush it, and shut the elixir in a song. | |
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| A song is neither live nor sweet nor white. | |
| It hath no heavenly blossom tall and pure, | |
| No fragrance can it breathe for our delight, | 25 |
| It grows not, neither lives; it may endure. | |
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| Sweet Tuberose, adieu! you fade too fast! | |
| Only a dream, only a thought, can last. | |
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III. Who’d stay to muse if Death could never wither? | |
| Who dream a dream if Passion did not pass? | 30 |
| But, once deceived, poor mortals hasten hither | |
| To watch the world in Fancy’s magic glass. | |
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| Truly your city, O men, hath no abiding! | |
| Built on the sand it crumbles, as it must; | |
| And as you build, above your praise and chiding, | 35 |
| The columns fall to crush you to the dust. | |
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| But fashion’d in the mirage of a dream, | |
| Having nor life nor sense, a bubble of nought, | |
| The enchanted City of the Things that seem | |
| Keeps till the end of time the eternal Thought. | 40 |
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| Forswear to-day, forswearing joy and sorrow, | |
| Forswear to-day, O man, and take to-morrow. | |
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