Verse > Anthologies > William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. > The Book of Elizabethan Verse
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William Stanley Braithwaite, ed.  The Book of Elizabethan Verse.  1907.
 
Song: ‘Ask me no more where Jove bestows’
By Thomas Carew (1595?–1639?)
 
ASK 1 me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauty’s orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.
 
Ask me no more whither do stray        5
The golden atoms of the day;
For in pure love heaven did prepare
Those powders to enrich your hair.
 
Ask me no more whither doth haste
The nightingale when May is past;        10
For in your sweet dividing throat
She winters and keeps warm her note.
 
Ask me no more where those stars light
That downwards fall in dead of night;
For in your eyes they sit, and there        15
Fixèd become as in their sphere.
 
Ask me no more if east or west
The Phœnix builds her spicy nest;
For unto you at last she flies,
And in your fragrant bosom dies.        20
 
Note 1. This remarkable and beautiful poem of Carew’s was one of the most imitated and parodied of its day. These appeared in the collections of verse, generally as “replies,” published after the Civil War. For specimens, see The Poems and Masque of Thomas Carew, Ebsworth ed., 1893, pp. 232–7. [back]
 
 
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