Oh, it’s a long, long while From May to December, But the days grow short, When you reach September.

These lines are from “September Song,” a popular ballad with lyrics by playwright Maxwell Anderson and music by Kurt Weill. The song was written for Anderson’s Broadway play Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), where it is sung by the aging, world-weary New Amsterdam governor Peter Stuyvesant as he reflects on late-life love and the swift passage of time. Premiering in the late Depression era, the piece became one of Weill’s best-known American songs and quickly escaped the theater into the wider popular repertoire through recordings and later revivals.

The stanza turns the calendar into a metaphor for a human lifespan. “May to December” suggests the long stretch from youth to old age, but the speaker insists that time seems to accelerate as one approaches life’s “September”—the onset of later years. The gentle rhyme and singable simplicity mask a sobering insight: awareness of mortality sharpens with age, making each remaining “day” feel shorter. In the play, the lyric underscores a late-blooming tenderness: precisely because time is running out, love and pleasure become more urgent and precious.