Versos English Dante Gabriel Rossetti Littell's Living Age/Volume 151/Issue 1948/Pride of Youth

English poem

Littell's Living Age/Volume 151/Issue 1948/Pride of Youth

by

Listen in the reader

as a child, of sorrow that we give The dead, but little in his heart can find, Since without need of thought to his clear mind Their turn it is to die and his to live: Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind, Nor, forward glorying, casts one look behind Where night-wrack shrouds the Old Love fugitive.

There is a change in every hour's recall And the last cowslip in the fields we see On the same day with the first corn-poppy. Alas for hourly change! Alas for all The loves that from his hand proud Youth lets fall, Even as the beads of a told rosary!