All You Vain Delights, by John Fletcher

John Fletcher · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

A single short lyric on two pages: the song beginning "Hence, all you vain delights," taken from John Fletcher's play The Nice Valour, act III, scene 3, with the source given in a footnote.

The poem dismisses pleasure as being as short as the nights spent in it, and argues that there is nothing sweet in life for a man wise enough to see it except melancholy — addressed directly as sweetest melancholy. What follows is a catalogue of the things the mood is made of: folded arms and fixed eyes, a sigh that pierces and mortifies, a look fastened to the ground, a tongue chained up without a sound. The setting is then filled in — fountain-heads and pathless groves, places which pale passion loves, moonlight walks when all the fowls are warmly housed save bats and owls, a midnight bell and a parting groan — and the piece ends with bones stretched in a still gloomy valley and the line that nothing is so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy. It is a small poem chosen for the series because it treats a withdrawn and inward state as a positive good rather than an affliction.

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