Thomas Campion (1567-1620). Hark, All You Ladies. William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. 1907. The Book of Elizabethan Verse

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William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Elizabethan Verse. 1907.

Hark, All You Ladies

By Thomas Campion (1567–1620)


HARK, 1 all you ladies that do sleep!
The fairy-queen Proserpina
Bids you awake and pity them that weep:
You may do in the dark
What the day doth forbid;	5
Fear not the dogs that bark,
Night will have all hid.

But if you let your lovers moan,
The fairy-queen Proserpina
Will send abroad her fairies every one,	10
That shall pinch black and blue
Your white hands and fair arms
That did not kindly rue
Your paramours’ harms.

In myrtle arbours on the downs	15
The fairy-queen Proserpina,
This night by moonshine leading merry rounds,
Holds a watch with sweet love,
Down the dale, up the hill;
No plaints or groans may move	20
Their holy vigil.

Note 1. From Campion and Rosseter’s A Book of Airs, 1601. The fourth and fifth stanzas of this poem, which are omitted in most editions outside of Campion’s Works, and which were unaccountably dropped from the text here, read:

	All you that will hold watch with love,
	The fairy-queen Proserpina
	Will make you fairer than Dione’s dove;
	Roses red, lilies white
	And the clear damask hue,
	Shall on your cheeks alight:
	Love will adorn you.

	All you that love or loved before,
	The fairy-queen Proserpina
	Bids you increase that loving humour more:
	They that have not fed
	On delights amorous,
	She vows that they shall lead
	Apes in Avernus.

This poem was printed anonymously among the Poems of Sundrie other Noblemen and Gentlemen, annexed to the surreptitious edition (Newman’s) of Astrophel and Stella, 1591. [back]

CONTENTS · GLOSSARY · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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