The Happy Marriage and Other Poems/Bronze

by Archibald MacLeish

BRONZE

Change; the rains pass, the daffodils decay,
May's thorn is withered soon,
And summer's rose
Follows the morning of a summer's day,
And with the moon
The sky pales, the wet wind blows,
And summer's gone.

Change; and nothing changes.
There is no space
To seize the shifting fashion and cry Now.
Always the shadow ranges,
Always the hour estranges,
Always to-morrow's morrow's at the brow.
Only our hearts,
Only our hearts that hold to loveliness
With hot undoubting—where the swallow darts

Find an enduring grace,
And in a face
Unchanging beauty there—
Only our hearts, when beauty has impair,
And lovely strangeness is in death more strange,
Imagine change.