What though youth gave love and roses,
Age still leaves us friends and wine.

Moore contrasts the romantic, idealized gifts of youth—“love and roses,” symbols of passion and beauty—with the consolations that remain in later life: enduring companionship and convivial pleasure (“friends and wine”). The couplet suggests a humane, unsentimental optimism: aging entails loss, but not emptiness. Instead of mourning what time takes, the speaker values what time can deepen—friendship, sociability, and the mature enjoyment of life’s simpler comforts. In Moore’s lyric mode, the line also participates in a long poetic tradition that pairs wine with fellowship as antidotes to transience, turning the awareness of time’s passage into a reason to cherish present company.