诗 · CONTENT CATEGORY
World poetry
Read poetry across languages and traditions, with authors, source editions and reviewed translations kept distinct.
136 reviewed public itemsThe Passionate Shepherd to His Love
A shepherd promises fields, flowers, fine clothes, music, and May dances to persuade his beloved to share an ideal pastoral life.
Her Reply
A reply tests the shepherd’s promises against decay and false speech, yet leaves a wistful conditional opening if youth and love could last.
Silvia
A song asks who Silvia is, answers by praising her holiness, beauty, wisdom and kindness, and ends by calling on the company to sing to her and bring her garlands.
The Blossom
Love spies a blossom stirred by the wind, the lover envies the air that touches it, and he pleads that breaking his sworn vow for her should not be counted a sin.
WHEN daisies pied and violets blue
Spring flowers, shepherds' pipes, mating birds and bleaching maidens fill the fields while the cuckoo's repeated call is heard as mockery of married men.
WHEN icicles hang by the wall
Winter cold, frozen milk, foul roads, wind and coughing are set against the owl's nightly cry, which the refrain calls a merry note while Joan keels the pot.
OVER hill, over dale
A fairy servant tells of wandering everywhere swifter than the moon's sphere in the fairy queen's service, and departs to seek dew-drops to hang on the cowslips.
YOU spotted snakes with double tongue
Fairies warn snakes, hedgehogs, spiders, beetles and snails away from their sleeping queen, with a sung lullaby refrain answering each set of warnings.
COME unto these yellow sands
A singer calls dancers to take hands and foot it on the sands while the waves fall silent, then breaks off to listen to barking watch-dogs and a crowing cock.
WHERE the bee sucks, there suck I
A spirit names where it feeds, lies and couches among flowers, rides on a bat's back after summer, and promises itself a merry life under the blossom.
Full fathom five thy father lies
A sea song transforms a drowned father into coral and pearl, turning death into a rich and strange change sounded by a ritual knell.
Love
The song asks where fancy is bred, answers that it is engendered in the eyes and fed with gazing, and rings its knell as it dies in the cradle where it lies.
Sweet-and-Twenty
A singer asks his roaming mistress to stay and hear her true love, then argues that mirth and kisses belong to the present because what is to come is unsure and youth will not endure.
Dirge
A speaker who says he has been slain by a cruel beloved calls on death to come, orders his own shroud and coffin, and asks to be buried where no flower, friend or grieving lover can ever find the grave.
Under the Greenwood Tree
Two stanzas invite anyone who shuns ambition and is content with what he finds to join the singer in the forest, where the only enemy is rough weather, and a third stanza mockingly answers that whoever leaves wealth and ease for this is a fool.
Blow blow, thou Winter Wind
Winter wind is less cruel than human ingratitude, while a bright holly refrain turns false friendship and foolish love into pointed irony.
It was a Lover and his Lass
Across four refrain-bound stanzas, a pair of lovers crossing the green corn-fields and rye is described singing a carol that life is but a flower and that the present time should be taken.
SHALL I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
The speaker asks whether to compare the beloved to a summer day, finds the beloved more lovely and temperate than summer’s brief and changeable beauty, and promises that these enduring lines will preserve that beauty and life as long as people can breathe or see.
Hymn to Diana
A hymn asks the huntress-goddess to keep her state now the sun has set, forbids the earth's shade to interpose, and asks her to lay bow and quiver aside and give the hunted hart space to breathe.
To Celia
Love becomes a toast made with the eyes, while a returned rose wreath is imagined to carry the beloved’s breath rather than its own scent.
Simplex Munditiis
The speaker distrusts a lady kept perpetually dressed, powdered and perfumed, and asks instead for loose robes and free hair, since studied art strikes the eyes but not the heart.
The Shadow
Taking a shadow that flees pursuit and pursues flight as its figure for courtship, the poem twice concludes in a refrain that women are styled the shadows of men.
The Triumph
The speaker calls onlookers to see his lady ride in Love's chariot, praises her eyes, hair and brow, and closes with a run of comparisons drawn from touch, smell and taste.
An Elegy
The poem turns from praising a lady's beauty to praising the virtue that binds her love to one, then addresses her as the deity who has rebuilt Love's fallen temples and asks a spark of her heat for the speaker's own unsatisfied love.