We shall meet
Once again
In the strange and latter summers,
And recall,
Like olden mummers,
An old play of love and pain.

I shall greet
You not with kisses
Of the days aforetime, knowing
These would fall
Vain as those of phantoms blowing
Nightward to the last abysses.

Faint perfume
Will attend you
Like a scrine-imprisoned myrrh;
And my dreaming
Heart where fallen autumns stir
Half their fallen light will lend you.

From the tomb
Love shall rise
Mutely, in a specter's fashion,
To the seeming
Lamps for ever bleak and ashen
Of our necromantic eyes.

But no tear
Shall we weep,
Knowing tears are void and vain,
Like the scattered
Drops of rain
On a desert's lion sleep.

Chill and sere,
Like the grass
Flaffing in a field of snow,
We shall know that nothing mattered,
As we tell our faded woe
Ere we pass.