Amy Lowell - Petals

Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart;
The end lost in dream,
They float past our view,
We only watch their glad, early start.
Freighted with hope,
Crimsoned with joy,
We scatter the leaves of our opening rose;
Their widening scope,
Their distant employ,
We never shall know. And the stream as it flows
Sweeps them away,
Each one is gone
Ever beyond into infinite ways.
We alone stay
While years hurry on,
The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

Aubrey Thomas De Vere - Sad is our youth, for it is ever going

Sad is our youth, for it is ever going, 

Crumbling away beneath our very feet; 

Sad is our life, for onward it is flowing 

In current unperceived, because so fleet; 

Sad are our hopes, for they were sweet in sowing,— 

But tares, self-sown, have overtopped the wheat; 

Sad are our joys, for they were sweet in blowing, 

And still, O, still their dying breath is sweet;

And sweet is youth, although it hath bereft us 

Of that which made our childhood sweeter still; 

And sweet is middle life, for it hath left us 

A nearer good to cure an older ill; 

And sweet are all things, when we learn to prize them, 

Not for their sake, but His who grants them or denies them!