Skip to content
Linespedia

To Virginia (on Her Birthday)

Topics: classic

Your past is past and never to return,     The long bright yesterday of life's first years,     Its days are dead -- cold ashes in an urn.     Some held for you a chalice for your tears,     And other days strewed flowers upon your way.     They all are gone beyond your reach,     And thus they are beyond my speech.     I know them not, so that your first gone times     To me unknown, lie far beyond my rhymes.     But I can bless your soul and aims to-day,     And I can ask your future to be sweet,     And I can pray that you may never meet     With any cross, you are too weak to bear.     Virginia, Virgin name, and may you wear     Its virtues and its beauties, fore'er and fore'er.     I breathe this blessing, and I pray this prayer.

AI analysis available. Enable JavaScript to interact.

About this line

"Your past is past and never to return,..."

Exploring the themes of classic, Abram Joseph Ryan delivers a powerful performance in "To Virginia (on Her Birthday)"... ### Why We Love This Line At Linespedia, we believe that poetry is the ultimate sanctuary for the soul...

Classified Tags

Related lines

"When I am dead, and all will soon forget      My words, and face, and ways --     I, somehow, think I'll walk beside thee yet      Adown thy af"

"He walked alone beside the lonely sea,     The slanting sunbeams fell upon his face,     His shadow fluttered on the pure white sands     Like"

"At the golden gates of the visions      I knelt me adown one day;     But sudden my prayer was a silence,      For I heard from the "Far away""

"Back to where the roses rest     Round a shrine of holy name,     (Yes -- they knew me when I came)     More of peace and less of fame      S"

"Here morning in the ploughman's songs is met     Ere yet one footstep shows in all the sky,     And twilight in the east, a doubt as yet,     S"

"The Text is taken from Percy's Reliques (1765), vol. i. p. 71, 'given from two MS. copies, transmitted from Scotland.' Herd had a very similar bal"

Continue Reading

"When I am dead, and all will soon forget      My w..."

Weekly Poetic Insight

Join our literary Sanctuary

Get the most inspiring lines, poetic analysis, and secret shayaris delivered to your inbox every Sunday.