dots-menu
×

Home  »  The Book of Elizabethan Verse  »  Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

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

Echo’s Dirge for Narcissus

Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

SLOW, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;

Yet slower, yet; O faintly, gentle springs!

List to the heavy part the music bears,

Woe weeps out her division when she sings.

Droop herbs and flowers;

Fall grief in showers;

Our beauties are not ours:

O, I could still,

Like melting snow upon some craggy hill,

Drop, drop, drop, drop,

Since Nature’s pride is now a withered daffodil.