Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.

The lines contrast several forms of human attachment and vitality—youth, romantic love, and friendship—each portrayed as subject to decline or seasonal loss. Against these transitory goods, the speaker sets “a mother’s secret hope,” suggesting a quiet, enduring faith in a child’s future that persists even when other sources of meaning wither. The adjective “secret” implies hope that is private, perhaps unspoken even to the child, and resilient in the face of disappointment or time. The couplet’s structure (a sequence of diminutions followed by a final survival) turns maternal hope into a moral constant: not naïve optimism, but a sustaining, long-lived commitment that outlasts changing circumstances.