The Primrose

Robert HerrickSeventeenth-century EnglishPoem

ASK me why I send you here
This sweet Infanta of the year?
Ask me why I send to you
This primrose, thus bepearl’d with dew?
I will whisper to your ears:—
The sweets of love are mix’d with tears.

Ask me why this flower does show
So yellow-green, and sickly too?
Ask me why the stalk is weak
And bending (yet it doth not break)?
I will answer:—These discover
What fainting hopes are in a lover.

Cultural reading

Reading the poem

In two matched stanzas of question and answer, the speaker explains that he sends a dew-covered primrose because love's sweets are mixed with tears, and that the flower's sickly colour and bending stalk show a lover's fainting hopes.

Language notes

Text and edition

The English text follows the fixed historical witness in The Oxford Book of English Verse; no modern third-party translation is included.