Webster. "All the Flowers of the Spring" from "The Devil's Law Case" (c.1610)

Excerpt from

The Devil's Law Case

By John Webster

[All the Flowers of the Spring]

ALL the Flowers of the Spring
Meet to perfume our burying :
These have but their growing prime,
And man does flourish but his time.
Survey our progresse from our birth,
We are set, we grow, we turne to earth.
Courts adieu, and all delights,
All bewitching appetites ;
Sweetest Breath, and clearest eye,
Like perfumes goe out and dye ;
And consequently this is done,
As shadowes wait upon the Sunne.
Vaine the ambition of Kings,
Who seeke by trophies and dead things,
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.

Source:
The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse.
H. J. C. Grierson and G. Bullough, eds.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934. 204-205.