LIFE AND ART

YOU have sweet flowers for your pleasure;

You laugh with the bountiful earth

In its richness of summer treasure:

Where now are your flowers and your mirth?

Petals and cadenced laughter,

Each in a dying fall,

Droop out of life; and after

Is nothing; they were all.

But we from the death of roses

That three suns perfume and gild

With a kiss, till the fourth discloses

A withered wreath, have distilled

The fulness of one rare phial,

Whose nimble life shall outrun

The circling shadow on the dial,

Outlast the tyrannous sun.