Your lips have touched my lips and blessed my soul,
Your age has been a beauty without time:
In you I held a mirror for my goal,
And danced with shadows to your golden rhyme.
Ah! If that sweetness now was touching me,
Ah! If all that’s fine still shone out its fair light,
I’d wrap it warm and take where I could see
The moonbeams shining from your flight.
I held a love that would not let me leave,
I shaped a passion that would never die:
I cried but now at last it’s time to grieve,
For time must – time will – time will ever fly.
So hush, my child, I love you still, ’tis me:
Though age has called – in here, in here you’re free.
The timeless beauty of a newborn child, who we aspire to be like; and then the contrast with the older child, who has to grow up, and grieving for those memories.
