Pointing you cheerfully in the direction of Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament might be a bit like suggesting you hold your toddler’s birthday party in a funeral parlour, but do please bear with me on this. Yes, Nashe’s verses are basically about the fact that we’re all going to die – and that even when we’re having the most fun we’re still jigging a danse macarbe to the grim reaper’s jolly tune. But how prettily he says it!
Flippancy aside, Nashe’s poem is at heart a cry of carpe diem. It’s from a play he wrote in 1593 to entertain the Archbishop of Canterbury when he was living in Croydon to escape the plague. Tough times, as anyone who’s been to Croydon will easily understand. And yet the play is a good-natured comedy in which, as harvest approaches, the passing season of Summer calls his servants together (springtime, the sun, even Orion the hunter), and like a good employer tries to get them to present their financial accounts. Which they can’t do, because they’ve all been having too much fun to take care of things like that. Summer tries to tell them off, but ends up pretty much giving up.
All things will pass, Nashe seems to say, but it’s in their passing that we enjoy them. There would be no first day of spring without winter, and no winter if summer never ended. And the same goes of life itself. Yet nothing makes me love life more than knowing I will lose it.
Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss,
This world uncertain is,
Fond are life’s lustful joys,
Death proves them all but toys,
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die:
Lord, have mercy on us.
Beauty is but a flower,
Which wrinkles will devour,
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die:
Lord, have mercy on us.
Haste therefore each degree,
To welcome destiny:
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player’s stage,
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die:
Lord, have mercy on us.
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