Roses I send to you
Beautiful messengers, fragrant and fair,
Greeting the morning all guiltless of care,
Ready to grace your dark tresses of hair:
Such I commend to you.
Roses I send to you:
Blushingly conscious,
each bud how demure!
Sad that their beauties so briefly endure!
Yet ere they fade may they carry secure,
All I intend to you.
When the rose is faded
When the rose is faded,
Memory may still dwell on
Her beauty shadowed,
And the sweet smell gone.
That vanishing loveliness,
That burdening breath,
No bond of life hath then,
Nor grief of death.
'Tis the immortal thought
Whose passion still
Makes the changing
The unchangeable.
Oh, thus thy beauty,
Loveliest on earth to me,
Dark with no sorrow, shines
And burns, with thee.
Text by
George Winkler
(from Songs Unbidden, 1920)
and Walter de la Mare, alt.