26 
SINGING AGAINST A THORN. 
She, poor bird, as all forlorn, 
Lean d her breast up-till a thorn , 
And there sung the dolefull’st ditty, 
That to hear it was great pity. 
‘ Fie, fie, fie,’ now would she cry, 
‘ Tereu, tereu ! ’ by and by ; 
That, to hear her so complain, 
Scarce I could from tears refrain ; 
For her griefs, so lively shown, 
Made me think upon mine own.” * 
The Passionate Pilgrim , xix.' 
Again, Lucrece, in her distress, invoking Philomel, says :— 
“ And whiles against a thorn thou bear’st thy part, 
To keep thy sharp woes waking.”— Lucrece. 
The same idea, too, has been variously expressed by 
other poets than Shakespeare. Fletcher speaks of— 
“ The bird forlorn 
That singeth with her breast against a thorn ; ” 
and Pomfret, writing towards the close of the seventeenth 
century, says :— 
“ The first music of the grove we owe 
To mourning Philomel’s harmonious woe ; 
* These lines, although included in most editions of Shakespeare’s Poems, 
are said to have been written by Richard Barnefield, and published in 1598 in a 
volume entitled “Poems in Divers Humors.” (See Ellis’s “Specimens of the 
Early English Poets,” vol. ii. p. 356, and F. T. Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury of 
the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language,” p. 21.) The 
‘ ‘ Passionate Pilgrim ” was not published until 1599. 
