James Russell Lowell: A New Year’s Greeting

James Russell Lowell

(1819–1891)

A New Year’s Greeting

 

The century numbers fourscore years;

You, fortressed in your teens,

To Time’s alarums close your ears,

And, while he devastates your peers,

Conceive not what he means.

 

If e’er life’s winter fleck with snow

Your hair’s deep shadowed bowers,

That winsome head an art would know

To make it charm, and wear it so

As ’twere a wreath of flowers.

 

If to such fairies years must come,

May yours fall soft and slow

As, shaken by a bee’s low hum,

The rose-leaves waver, sweetly dumb,

Down to their mates below!

 

James Russell Lowell poetry

kempis.nl poetry magazine

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