page_title: To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
section_title: Possible influences/origins
hierarchical_section_title: To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time / Possible influences/origins
caption_attribution_description: English: The Book of old English songs and ballads
context_page_description: "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" is a poem written by English Cavalier poet Robert Herrick in the 17th century. The poem is in the genre of carpe diem, Latin for seize the day.
context_section_description: The opening line, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may", echoes the Latin phrase collige, virgo, rosas ("gather, girl, the roses"), which appears at the end of the poem "De rosis nascentibus", also called "Idyllium de rosis", attributed to Ausonius or Virgil.
  In the second book of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, a young man in the Bower of Bliss sings, "Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime,/ For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre:/ Gather the Rose of love, whilest yet is time,/ Whilest loving thou mayst loved be with equall crime."
  The first line and the theme of the poem also echo a well-known couplet in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18:
  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
  
  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
  — Lines 3-4
  Nearly the same sense was expressed thousands of years earlier in Wisdom of Solomon 2:8, "Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither", a verse ironically given as the example of a fool's reasoning in denying the resurrection of the dead and turning to licence.
caption: Illustration by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
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