You have sweet flowers for your pleasure; You laugh with the bountiful earthIn 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 gildWith a kiss, till the fourth discloses A withered wreath, have distilledThe fulness of one rare phial, Whose nimble life shall outrunThe circling shadow on the dial, Outlast the tyrannous sun.