Life is so short, so fast the lone hours fly, We ought to be together, you and I.

The couplet compresses a familiar Victorian meditation on time’s swiftness into an intimate appeal. By stressing how quickly “the lone hours fly,” the speaker frames solitude as a kind of waste or loss, and proposes companionship as the proper answer to life’s brevity. The rhyme and balanced phrasing (“so short, so fast”; “you and I”) give the sentiment the feel of a lyric refrain—less an argument than an emotional insistence. Read broadly, it urges prioritizing human closeness over delay, distance, or estrangement: if time is scarce, shared life becomes both consolation and moral imperative.