JOHN GAY'S POEM - YOUTH AND LOVE

   

On the 26 th day of the Blog chatter’s #WRITEAPAGEADAY, Here is a poem with love as the major theme.

 

Poet: John Gay

Poem:   YOUTH AND LOVE

 

YOUTH’s the season made for joys,

Love is then our duty,

She alone who that employs,

Well deserves her beauty.

Let’s be gay,

While we may,

Beauty’s a flower despised in decay.

Chorus: Youth’s the season, etc.

 

Let us drink and sport today,

Ours is not to –morrow.

Love with Youth flies swift away,

Age is nought but sorrow.

Dance and sing,

Time’s on the wing.

Life never knows the return of spring.

Chorus: Let us drink, etc.

     John Gay was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera (1728), a ballad opera. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names. The above song Youth and Love is from the Songs from The Beggar’s Opera: Air IV-Cotillion, Act II, Scene iv. The Beggar’s Opera was in some ways the culmination of Gay’s career. The play ran for sixty-two nights. Swift is said to have suggested the subject, and Pope and Arbuthnot were constantly consulted while the work was in progress, but Gay must be regarded as the sole author.

 

     Gay had many patrons and one of them was Pope. The dedication of his Rural Sports (1713) to Alexander Pope was the beginning of a lasting friendship. In 1714, Gay wrote The Shepherd's Week, a series of six pastorals drawn from English rustic life. Pope had urged him to undertake this task in order to ridicule the Arcadian pastorals of Ambrose Philips, who had been praised by a short-lived contemporary publication The Guardian, to the neglect of Pope's claims as the first pastoral writer of the age and the true English Theocritus. Gay's pastorals achieved this goal and his ludicrous pictures of the English country lads and their loves were found to be entertaining on their own account.