Poems (Odom)/The Broken Lens
THE BROKEN LENS.
Oh! never again, my darling, Never for you and me,Will ring the chime of the sweet spring-time, Of life as it used to be.
We all must change, my darling Must pass through shadow and shine,Must drain our cup as it sparkles up, The lees with the rich, red wine.
The river of life, my darling, Flows evenly from its source,But gathers strength, with its rushing length, To meet the Ocean's force.
That great "wide sea," my darling, That spreads from sky to sky,The boundless blue of the false and the true, The fetterless By-and-by.
Oh! the world is fair, my darling, Too fair to the eyes of youth;We look through a lens, at its units and tens, And count them as millions of truth.
Time shivers the glass, my darling, And shatters our castle towers;The millions and tens go down with the lens, And only the units are ours.
Only the units, my darling, We hold with a sense of pain,And we vainly sigh, as the years go by, To look through the lens again.