Dedication

Ask me not how they came,

These songs of love and death,

These dreams of a futile stage,

These thumb-nails seen in the street:

Ask me not how nor why,

But take them for your own,

Dear Wife of twenty years,

Knowing — O, who so well?—

You it was made the man

That made these songs of love,

Death, and the trivial rest:

So that, your love elsewhere,

These songs, or bad or good —

How should they ever have been?