The days of wine and roses
Laugh and run away
Like a child at play
Through a meadow land
Toward a closing door
A door marked “Nevermore”
That wasn’t there before

These lines are from “The Days of Wine and Roses,” a popular song with lyrics by Johnny Mercer and music by Henry Mancini, written for the 1962 film of the same name (directed by Blake Edwards). The film follows a couple whose early romance and social drinking slide into alcoholism, and the song functions as a lyrical distillation of that arc: the intoxicating, seemingly carefree “days” that feel endless at first, then vanish with startling speed. Mercer, one of America’s most celebrated lyricists, was known for pairing conversational clarity with bittersweet emotional turns—qualities that suit the film’s theme of pleasure giving way to irrevocable loss.

The lyric frames happiness as something fleeting and childlike: it “laugh[s] and run[s] away / Like a child at play,” suggesting innocence and spontaneity. The pastoral “meadow land” evokes an idealized, sunlit period of life, but the movement is “Toward a closing door,” an image of time narrowing into finality. The door marked “Nevermore” implies a point of no return—once crossed, the earlier ease cannot be recovered. In the film’s context, the metaphor resonates as a warning about how quickly pleasure can harden into consequence, and how nostalgia can’t reopen what experience has shut.