Song
Abbott Handerson Thayer, Roses, 1907
If space and time, as sages say,
Are things that cannot be,
The fly that lives a single day
Has lived as long as we.
But let us live while yet we may,
While love and life are free,
For time is time, and runs away,
Through sages disagree.
The flowers I sent thee when the dew
Was trembling on the vine
Were withered ere the wild bee flew
To suck the eglantine.
But let us haste to pluck anew
Nor mourn to see them pine,
And though the flowers of life be few
Yet let them be divine.
T.S.Eliot
We got another version with one more stanza.
If Time and Space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is then we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
to live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity.
So, this is placed at the beginning, the first here for third.
Anyway, eventually, the sense of the poem remains quite the same. x
umh odd enough that stanza seems to be part of ‘A lyric’, while Song is introduced the way I transcribed it here
so there would be two poems with the same final stanza
is that possible?
I must solve this enigma
x