As I have seen the Lady of the May
Set in an arbour, on a holiday,
Built by the May-pole, where the jocund swains
Dance with the maidens to the bagpipe's strains,
When envious night commands them to be gone,
Call for the merry youngsters one by one,
And for their well performance soon disposes:
To this a garland interwove with roses,
To that a carved hook or well-wrought scrip,
Gracing another with her cherry lip;
To one her garter, to another then
A handkerchief cast o'er and o'er again;
And none returneth empty that hath spent

My pretty lad, quoth Thetis, thou dost well
To fear the loss of thy dear Philocel.
But tell me, sure, what may that shepherd be?
Or if it lie in us to set him tree,
Or if with you yond people touch'd with woe
Under the self-same load of sorrow go.
Fair queen, replied the swain, one is the cause
That moves our grief, and those kind shepherds draws
To yonder rock. Thy more than mortal spirit
May give a good beyond our power to merit;
And therefore please to hear while I shall tell
The hapless fate of hopeless Philocel.

A youthful shepherd of the neighbour wold,
Missing that morn a sheep out of his fold,
Carefully seeking round to find his stray,
Came on the instant where this damsel lay.
Anger and pity in his manly breast
Urge yet restrain his tears. Sweet maid, possess'd
(Quoth he) with lasting sleep, accept from me
His end, who ended thy hard destiny!
With that his strong dog, of no dastard kind,
Swift as the foals conceived by the wind,
He sets upon the wolf, that now with speed
Flies to the neighbour-wood; and lest a deed
So full of ruth should unrevenged be,

Look as a well-grown, stately-headed buck,
But lately by the woodman's arrow struck,
Runs gadding o'er the lawns, or nimbly strays
Among the cumbrous brakes a thousand ways,
Now through the high-wood scours, then by the brooks,
On every hillside, and each vale he looks,
If 'mongst their store of simples may be found
An hero to draw and heal his smarting wound,
But when he long hath sought, and all in vain,
Steals to the covert closely back again,
Where round engirt with fern more highly sprung,
Strives to appease the raging with his tongue,

Now wanders Pan the arched groves, and hills
Where fairies often danc'd, and shepherds' quills
In sweet contentions pass'd the tedious day:
Yet, being early, in his unknown way
Met not a shepherd, nor on all the plain
A flock then feeding saw, nor of his train
One jolly satyr stirring yet abroad,
Of whom he might inquire; this to the load
Of his affliction adds. Now he invokes
Those nymphs in mighty forests that with oaks
Have equal fates, each with her several tree
Receiving birth and ending destiny:
Calls on all powers, entreats that he might have

Once (yet that once too often) heretofore
The silver Ladon on his sandy shore
Heard my complaints, and those cool groves that be
Shading the breast of lovely Arcady
Witnesse[d] the tears which I for Syrinx spent:
Syrinx the fair, from whom the instrument
That fills your feasts with joy (which when I blow
Draws to the sagging dug milk white as snow),
Had his beginning. This enough had been
To show the Fates, my deemed sisters, teen.
Here had they stay'd, this adage had been none:
“That our disasters never come alone.”

In lovely May when Titan's golden rays
Make odds in hours between the nights and days,
And weigheth almost down the once-even scale
Where night and day by th' Equinoctial
Were laid in balance, as his pow'r he bent
To banish Cynthia from her regiment
To Latmus' stately hill, and with his light
To rule the upper world both day and night;
Making the poor Antipodes to fear
A like conjunction 'twixt great Jupiter
And some Alcmena new, or that the sun
From their horizon did obliquely run:
This time the swains and maidens of the Isle

Yet that their happy voyage might not be
Without time's short'ner, heaven-taught melody
(Music that lent feet to the stable woods,
And in their currents turn'd the mighty floods:
Sorrow's sweet nurse, yet keeping joy alive:
Sad discontent's most welcome corrosive:
The soul of Art, best lov'd when Love is by:
The kind inspirer of sweet Poesy,
Lest thou shouldst wanting be, when swans would fain
Have sung one song, and never sung again,)
The gentle shepherd hasting to the shore
Began this lay, and tim'd it with his oar:

Never more let holy Dec

For as with hanging head I have beheld
A widow vine stand in a naked field,
Unhusbanded, neglected, all forlorn,
Brows'd on by deer, by cattle cropp'd and torn;
Unpropp'd, unsuccoured by stake or tree
From wreakful storms' impetuous tyranny,
When, had a willing hand lent kind redress,
Her pregnant bunches might from out the press
Have sent a liquor both for taste and show
No less divine than those of Malligo:
Such was this wight, and such she might have been.
She both th' extremes hath felt of Fortune's teen,
For never have we heard from times of yore,

By this was Philocel returning back,
And in his hand the lady; for whose wrack
Nature had clean foresworn to frame a wight
So wholly pure, so truly exquisite;
But more deform'd and from a rough-hewn mould,
Since what is best lives seldom to be old,
Within their sight was fairest Cælia now;
Who drawing near, the life-priz'd golden bough
Her love beheld. And as a mother kind
What time the new-cloth'd trees by gusts of wind
Unmov'd, stand wistly list'ning to those lays
The feather'd quiristers upon their sprays
Chant to the merry Spring, and in the even