Were love but true, no frost would mar the flowers,
No fatal frost that down the garden bowers
Steals hideously from bloom to blissful bloom,
The shimmering weft of summer's golden loom,
And mocks with blight their radiant, dreamful hours.

Nor would the waste and wreck of orient towers,
Slow-sunken from the reach of sun and showers,
Tax the unfeatured sands for burial room,
Were love but true.

For love is lord of earth's phantasmal powers,
And all that seems with his own fact he dowers.
The shapes of art, the growths of nature's womb,
From love, the one reality, take doom,
And life might laugh at death that overlowers,
Were love but true.