Oh, the days dwindle down
To a precious few…
And these few precious days
I’ll spend with you.

These lines are from “September Song,” a lyric written by American playwright Maxwell Anderson for the Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), with music by Kurt Weill. In the show, the song is associated with an older man reflecting on late-in-life love and the narrowing horizon of time. Written on the eve of World War II and during the late Depression era, the lyric’s plainspoken tenderness and awareness of mortality helped make it a popular standard beyond the stage, frequently performed as a standalone song by later singers.

The speaker measures life by its remaining “precious few” days, turning the inevitability of aging into a reason for devotion rather than despair. The repetition of “precious” underscores a shift in values: time, once abundant, becomes the ultimate scarce resource, and love becomes the chosen way to spend it. The ellipsis suggests emotion that exceeds speech—an awareness that the sentiment is both simple and profound. As a lyric, it balances melancholy (dwindling days) with resolve (I’ll spend with you), making it a concise statement of late-life gratitude and commitment.