The Vow of the Peacock and Other Poems/Change
CHANGE.
I would not care, at least so much, sweet Spring,
For the departing colour of thy flowers—
The green leaves early falling from thy boughs—
Thy birds so soon forgetful of their songs—
Thy skies, whose sunshine ends in heavy showers;—
But thou dost leave thy memory, like a ghost,
To haunt the ruined heart, which still recurs
To former beauty; and the desolate
Is doubly sorrowful when it recalls
It was not always desolate.
When those eyes have forgotten the smile they wear now,
When care shall have shadowed that beautiful brow—
When thy hopes and thy roses together lie dead,
And thy heart turns back pining to days that are fled—
Then wilt thou remember what now seems to pass
Like the moonlight on water, the breath-stain on glass:
Oh! maiden, the lovely and youthful, to thee,
How rose-touched the page of thy future must be!
By the past, if thou judge it, how little is there
But flowers that flourish, but hopes that are fair;
And what is thy present? a southern sky's spring,
With thy feelings and fancies like birds on the wing.
As the rose by the fountain flings down on the wave
Its blushes, forgetting its glass is its grave:
So the heart sheds its colour on life's early hour,
But the heart has its fading as well as the flower.
The charmed light darkens, the rose-leaves are gone,
And life, like the fountain, floats colourless on.
Said I, when thy beauty's sweet vision was fled,
How wouldst thou turn, pining, to days like the dead!
Oh! long ere one shadow shall darken that brow,
Wilt thou weep like a mourner o'er all thou lovest now;
When thy hopes, like spent arrows, fall short of their mark;
Or, like meteors at midnight, make darkness more dark;
When thy feelings lie fettered like waters in frost,
Or, scattered too freely, are wasted and lost:
For aye cometh sorrow, when youth has pass'd by—
What saith the Arabian? Its memory's a sigh.