Life and Art

YOU have sweet flowers for your pleasure;
  You laugh with the bountiful earth
In its richness of summer treasure:
  Where now are your flowers and your mirth?
Petals and cadenced laughter,
  Each in a dying fall,
Droop out of life; and after
  Is nothing; they were all.

But we from the death of roses
  That three suns perfume and gild
With a kiss, till the fourth discloses
  A withered wreath, have distilled
The fulness of one rare phial,
  Whose nimble life shall outrun
The circling shadow on the dial,
  Outlast the tyrannous sun.