Poems (Hoffman)/The Years
THE YEARS
Stay, stay, sweet Years, bright circling golden YearsWith your glad Summers full of sunbeam smilesAnd sobbing Winters wet with raindrop tears,Your pensive Autumns and the witching wilesOf Spring-time days, showers, sunbeams, hopes and fearsWeave your fair coronets, ye fleeting Years!
Ah, is it true that ye will come between,Like a vast, heedless, hurrying multitude,Between us and the faces that we love,Crowding us farther, farther, still apart,Hiding them from us by a darkening screen?O Years, bright golden Years, must ye intrudeAt last in endless bitterness to proveA mighty barrier, 'twixt heart and heart?
Stay, hurrying Years, why speed away so fast?Rest your bright wings, for we are happy now,Ye mock us, for ye say, "It cannot last."Are Youth's fresh hopes but idle, feverish dreamsThat like bright bubbles only soar to break?Leave us the present, all too fair it seems—If dreams are happiness why should we wake?
Already are your dazzling rainbow huesChanging to pallid spectres grim and gaunt.Bright Years, will ye your bloom and beauty loseAnd like pale ghostly forms life's pathway haunt?Will ye plow furrows, hard, unlovely linesWhere ruby roses blush and mingle nowWith pearly lilies, fragile tenderness,On lips and cheek and brow?Will ye crush out with careless, ruthless tread The tender embryoes that spring to lifeIn countless crevices of heart and soul,That Love hath nurtured and that Hope hath fedThat where weeds grew there might be flowers instead?
Will ye break in like thieves in rayless nightAnd steal the diamonds one by one awayThat flashed from Love's bright ring their varying light'Till all are gone whom we had hoped might stay?Ah! will ye prey upon life's youthful tree'Till flower and fruit and leaf are in decay'Till the life fluid surging in its heartWith such fresh, ardent living energyIs quenched, its channels parched, its fountain dry'Till all it was or promised still to beWith branches reaching even to the skyDown in the fossil depths of earth is thrownTo petrify and harden into stone?O beauteous Years, if only these ye leaveTake, take the gentle sentiments that grieve,Let not the blows that all have overthrownLeave one faint wound upon the heart's cold stone!
But no, bright Years, Faith, Mercy, Hope declareFalse are the prophecies of veiled DespairWho whispers: "Oh, the Years are flying fastYe now are happy but it cannot last;"They sing, with folded wings above the heart,"Faith, Mercy, Love and Hope will not departThe Years can have no power to make thee oldThe warm deep springs of Love shall not grow cold;Mercy shall drop her dew in blessing down,True Happiness braid still her blossom crown Hope's fadeless star outshines Heaven's brightest spheresAnd Faith, the angel of the tide of years,Points out beyond Time's fog and mysteryThe boundless ocean of eternity."
Surge on bright Years, ye are but waves that tendTo bear us nearer to our journey's end;When we look back our life's appointed wayWill we regret that ye refused to stay?All that ye bear away we yet shall find,—The jewels to thy murky depths consigned,The blossoms tossed so swiftly from our sight,All that was beautiful and good and brightAre borne before us through Time's dark defilesTo wait our coming 'midst the fadeless isles.