Ask Me No More is a poem by the English poet Thomas Carew. The poem is also known by the simple title “A Song.” Thomas Carew was the earliest and perhaps most distinguished of a group known as the Cavalier poets, who wrote with witty and elegant verse styles. This group of poets served at the court of King Charles I, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1625 to 1649.
None of Carew’s verses was published in his lifetime, though many were widely distributed. “Ask Me No More” was published, along with the rest of Carew’s poems, in 1640, some weeks after his death. The verse is a song that pays tribute to a lady whom the speaker desires.
Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose; For in your beauty’s orient deep These flowers, as in their causes, sleep. Ask me no more whither doth stray The golden atoms of the day; For in pure love heaven did prepare Those powders to enrich your hair. Ask me no more whither doth haste The nightingale, when May is past; For in your sweet dividing throat She winters, and keeps warm her note. Ask me no more where those stars light That downwards fall in dead of night; For in your eyes they sit, and there Fixed become, as in their sphere. Ask me no more if east or west The phoenix builds her spicy nest; For unto you at last she flies, And in your fragrant bosom dies.
The poem keys in on the mysteries of myth and nature, all of which are captured in the person of the lover. Like all of Carew’s verses, this poem is carefully structured. Its five stanzas make effective use of rhyme and meter. The songlike cadence is based on an iambic rhythm of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables and a rhyme scheme of rhyming line pairs (aa, bb). Each stanza, with its repetition of the first line’s opening phrase, builds on the poem’s mood of elegant praise and sensuous imagery.
Carew greatly admired another poet of his time, Ben Jonson. Jonson was a scholar of classical literature who used the classical ideals of elegance and precision in his verse. Like Jonson, Carew wrote finely crafted poems modeled on the graceful verses of the ancient Greeks and Romans. But Carew’s works also included the direct approach to the themes of love and beauty that was found in Cavalier poetry.
