Spend all you have for loveliness,Buy it and never count the cost;For one white singing hour of peaceCount many a year of strife well lost,And for a breath of ecstasyGive all you have been, or could be.
Sara Teasdale · Love Songs
Joy & wonder
“Spend all you have for loveliness,”
- Author
- Sara Teasdale
- Work
- Love Songs
- Year
- 1917
- Chapter / part
- Barter
- Length
- 42 words
- Source
- Project Gutenberg eBook #442
Public domain. This passage is in the public domain. Sara Teasdale died in 1933, more than 70 years ago, and the work was first published in 1917. You can copy, print, read aloud or sell it without asking permission; a credit is kind but not required. The text is copied word for word from the Project Gutenberg edition linked here.
Related passages
Life has loveliness to sell,All beautiful and splendid things,Blue waves whitened on a cliff,Soaring fire that sways and sings,And children's faces looking upHolding wonder like a cup.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying:And this same flower that smiles to-dayTo-morrow will be dying.
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,Jumping from the chair she sat in;Time, you thief, who love to getSweets into your list, put that in!Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,Say I’m growing old, but add,Jenny kiss’d me.
My heart is like a singing birdWhose nest is in a water’d shoot;My heart is like an apple-treeWhose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;My heart is like a rainbow shellThat paddles in a halcyon sea;My heart is gladder than all these,Because my love is come to me.
My heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began;So is it now I am a man;So be it when I shall grow old,Or let me die!The Child is father of the Man;And I could wish my days to beBound each to each by natural piety.
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