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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Arthur L. Phelps

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

There Was a Rose

Arthur L. Phelps

THERE was a rose that faded where it grew;

There was a bird that could not brook the wind;

There was a sunset whose wild glory thinned

To nothing-wonder and the night’s ash hue.

Pale blossoms, when they quicken, count life sped;

And there were purple asters in the fall

Of the cold year that withered by the wall

And died, with all spring’s dreams about them dead.

A rose, a bird, a sunset, and a weed,

A blossom whose death sentence is its sky—

Yea, and dead waves that break on sobbing seas.

Man is a faint, frail brother, with no creed

These know not of. Behold, all things must die,

And all the vaunting ages are as these.