Thomas Love Peacock

Love and Age

I PLAY’D with you ’mid cowslips blowing,
    When I was six and you were four;
When garlands weaving, flower-balls throwing,
 Were pleasures soon to please no more.
Through groves and meads, o’er grass and heather,
    With little playmates, to and fro,
We wander’d hand in hand together;
    But that was sixty years ago.

You grew a lovely roseate maiden,
    And still our early love was strong;
Still with no care our days were laden,
    They glided joyously along;
And I did love you very dearly,
    How dearly words want power to show;
I thought your heart was touch’d as nearly;
    But that was fifty years ago.

Then other lovers came around you,
    Your beauty grew from year to year,
And many a splendid circle found you
    The centre of its glittering sphere.
I saw you then, first vows forsaking,
    On rank and wealth your hand bestow;
O, then I thought my heart was breaking!—
    But that was forty years ago.

And I lived on, to wed another:
    No cause she gave me to repine;
And when I heard you were a mother,
    I did not wish the children mine.
My own young flock, in fair progression,
    Made up a pleasant Christmas row:
My joy in them was past expression;
    But that was thirty years ago.

You grew a matron plump and comely,
    You dwelt in fashion’s brightest blaze;
My earthly lot was far more homely;
    But I too had my festal days.
No merrier eyes have ever glisten’d
    Around the hearth-stone’s wintry glow,
Than when my youngest child was christen’d;
    But that was twenty years ago.

Time pass’d. My eldest girl was married,
    And I am now a grandsire gray;
One pet of four years old I’ve carried
    Among the wild-flower’d meads to play.
In our old fields of childish pleasure,
    Where now, as then, the cowslips blow,
She fills her basket’s ample measure;
    And that is not ten years ago.

But though first love’s impassion’d blindness
    Has pass’d away in colder light,
I still have thought of you with kindness,
    And shall do, till our last good-night.
The ever-rolling silent hours
    Will bring a time we shall not know,
When our young days of gathering flowers
    Will be an hundred years ago.