Source identified1
Image design Coastal
Read & copy
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying:”
Meaning & context
Herrick’s speaker uses rapidly fading flowers as a carpe-diem image, urging action while youth and opportunity remain available.
Source details
“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.