The Time When I First Fell in Love
The Time When I First Fell in Love
Original Text
The Phnix Nest (London, 1593; Menston: Scolar Press, 1973). PR 1207 P5 1593a Robarts Library
2 Which now I must lament;
3The year wherein I lost such time
4 To compass my content.
5 The day wherein I saw too late
6 The follies of a lover;
7The hour wherein I found such loss
8 As care cannot recover.
9 And last, the minute of mishap,
10 Which makes me thus to plain
11The doleful fruits of lover's suits,
12 Which labour lose in vain:
13 Doth make me solemnly protest,
14 As I with pain do prove,
15There is no time, year, day, nor hour,
16 Nor minute, good to love.
Notes
1] Elizabethan printed miscellanies, or anthologies of poems by various authors known and unknown, were a development of the contemporary and earlier habit of making commonplace-books, into which were copied (amongst other things) poems especially pleasing to the particular compiler. Even after the gradual disappearance of the aristocratic prejudice against the vulgarity of having one's poems printed, this custom persisted, and a large number of 16th and 17th century MS> books are stille extant.The most famous printed anthologies from 1557 (Tottel's Songs and Sonnets) to 1602 are here represented. Back to Line
Publication Start Year
1593
RPO poem Editors
N. J. Endicott
RPO Edition
2RP.1.235; RPO 1996-2000.
Rhyme