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Home  »  The Book of Elizabethan Verse  »  Thomas Campion (1567–1620)

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

Hark, All You Ladies

Thomas Campion (1567–1620)

HARK, 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;

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,

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

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

Their holy vigil.