Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying:”
- Date
- 1648
Meaning of “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time…”
Herrick’s speaker uses rapidly fading flowers as a carpe-diem image, urging action while youth and opportunity remain available.
Where does it come from?
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” published in Hesperides in 1648. The poem’s later marriage exhortation reflects its seventeenth-century social setting; the opening image is retained as literary carpe-diem rhetoric, not universal relationship advice.