Oh! ever thus, from childhood’s hour,
I’ve seen my fondest hope decay;
I never loved a tree or flower,
But ’twas the first to fade away.
I never nurs’d a dear gazelle
To glad me with its soft black eye,
But when it came to know me well,
And love me, it was sure to die.

These lines are from Thomas Moore’s lyric “Oh! Ever Thus,” a poem-song of lament in which the speaker reflects on a lifelong pattern of loss: whatever he cherishes seems destined to perish. Moore (1779–1852), celebrated for his Irish Melodies and for drawing-room songs, often wrote in a sentimental, musical idiom suited to performance and domestic reading. “Oh! Ever Thus” belongs to that Romantic-era taste for elegiac feeling and the personalization of grief, using small, vivid emblems (a flower, a gazelle) to dramatize the fragility of happiness and the recurrent disappointment of hope.

The speaker frames misfortune as a kind of fate: from childhood onward, love and attachment are followed by decay. The “tree or flower” suggests ordinary, innocent pleasures, while the “dear gazelle” intensifies the pathos by giving the beloved object a responsive gaze and the capacity to “know” and “love” the speaker back. The repeated “I never…” structure turns private grief into a pattern, implying that tenderness itself invites loss. In Romantic terms, the poem treats sensibility as both a virtue and a vulnerability: the more deeply one feels, the more one is exposed to the world’s transience.