THE SECRET OF ROSE

Secret symbol of love or sacrifice to fertility - ever panting, thirsting for the cooling springs of showers. Time is stubbornly dying. And like the loss of petals proclaiming fragility, The proud hopeful light of dawn, More and more humbled, unprofitably, sheds its rays! 

Its thorny, unbreakable stalk now closes, Like the sigh of the condemned at the right of last words,- Its opening, majestic chalice now resembles but a broken mother-cup! In her room, where all day long She bathed in halo, enthroned on her girded lofty throne, In her vase's crystal tube Someone put fresh water, 

delaying for lingering minutes the remnant doomed to mortality! I could not take it down from the table, its thorny crown of branches secretly prevented it from becoming the wide-bowled maraud of our dustbin: its existence, already, is but fragments if it is enough. Fatal transience, like a sly doer, has deliberately and slowly stripped naked her dying petals! - I examined him as he lay naked and bare before me, 

with a broken, sweet, princely head, as a damned queen, who had clung in secret, and now her morals were offended to go among men! I examine the swan-print of fingerprints in the place of my pitted love: Were we but conscious, proud fools that common plausible 

By a will we deceived ourselves, lied to ourselves? The time, too, is growing duller and duller: hazy and misty - and while I turn out my lamp, while I still hope with lost faith that from above my star-eye looks down upon me!