The Full Text of “There Is a Garden in Her Face”
1There is a garden in her face
2Where roses and white lilies grow;
3A heav'nly paradise is that place
4Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.
5There cherries grow which none may buy,
6Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
7Those cherries fairly do enclose
8Of orient pearl a double row,
9Which when her lovely laughter shows,
10They look like rose-buds fill'd with snow;
11Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy,
12Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
13Her eyes like angels watch them still,
14Her brows like bended bows do stand,
15Threat'ning with piercing frowns to kill
16All that attempt with eye or hand
17Those sacred cherries to come nigh,
18Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
The Full Text of “There Is a Garden in Her Face”
1There is a garden in her face
2Where roses and white lilies grow;
3A heav'nly paradise is that place
4Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.
5There cherries grow which none may buy,
6Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
7Those cherries fairly do enclose
8Of orient pearl a double row,
9Which when her lovely laughter shows,
10They look like rose-buds fill'd with snow;
11Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy,
12Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
13Her eyes like angels watch them still,
14Her brows like bended bows do stand,
15Threat'ning with piercing frowns to kill
16All that attempt with eye or hand
17Those sacred cherries to come nigh,
18Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
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“There Is a Garden in Her Face” Introduction
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"There is a Garden in her Face" is a Renaissance love song by Thomas Campion. In this poem (which was originally set to lute music), a speaker describes a lady's beautiful face as a garden that grows sweet cherries but warns that nobody can taste those cherries until they hear the lady cry, like a fruitseller, "cherry ripe"! Female beauty, the poem suggests, can be tantalizing, and all the more so when the lady in question plays hard to get. The poem first appeared in an anthology of Campion's songs, The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres (1617).
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“There Is a Garden in Her Face” Summary
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The lady's face is a lovely garden that grows roses and lilies. It's paradise; every kind of delicious fruit grows there, including cherries that no one can taste until the cherries themselves say they're ripe.
The lady's teeth are like two rows of lustrous pearls within those cherries. When the lady laughs, her mouth looks like a rosebud that has caught snow in its petals. But neither nobleman nor royalty can taste those cherries until the cherries themselves say they're ripe.
The lady's eyes watch over her cherry lips like guardian angels; her eyebrows are like drawn bows, ready to frown and shoot down anyone who tries to look at or touch those lovely cherries until the cherries themselves say they're ripe.
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“There Is a Garden in Her Face” Themes
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Women's Tantalizing Beauty
In this classic Renaissance love song, a speaker describes a woman’s face as a beautiful garden. Alas for the speaker, this garden is awfully hard to enjoy: the lady in question is sparing with her affections, and won't let anyone in. Through an extended metaphor that presents the lady’s lips as ripe but unpluckable cherries, the speaker suggests that female beauty can be both tempting and tantalizing, a pleasure that always seems to be just out of reach.
Like a good courtier, this poem’s speaker praises a lady’s face by depicting it as a paradisiacal garden. (See Shakespeare’s satirical Sonnet 130 for a sense of just how common such comparisons were!) Her skin is like lilies and roses, her teeth as white as pearl. Most lovely of all, the speaker says, are her lips, which are like sweet cherries. In short, this lady’s face strikes the speaker as nothing less than heaven on earth, a Garden of Eden full of fragrant flowers and sweet fruits.
The trouble is, the speaker goes on, nobody seems to be able to get into that garden or try the produce. As the poem’s refrain repeatedly insists, nobody, not even a “peer” (a nobleman) or a “prince,” is allowed to taste the lady’s “cherry” lips until those lips themselves call “cherry ripe”—in other words, before the lady is good and ready. And it takes a lot for her to be ready! She guards her beauty with eyes that put the speaker in mind of stern angels, her eyebrows drawn like “bows” to shoot down unwanted suitors with her “piercing frowns.” Like Eden, the heavenly garden of her face is strictly off limits!
All the lady’s suitors are thus left to long for those metaphorical cherries without much hope of getting to try them—a predicament, this song hints, that might feel cruelly familiar to plenty of lovers.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “There Is a Garden in Her Face”
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Lines 1-4
There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies grow;
A heav'nly paradise is that place
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.As Thomas Campion's contemporary William Shakespeare knew well, there was nothing a poet of the English Renaissance liked more than comparing a lady to something she wasn't. In this particular 17th-century love song, the speaker chooses a classic horticultural conceit, a green and pleasant extended metaphor with which to sing a lady's praises:
There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies grow;The garden of this lady's face, in other words, marks her out as an ideal Elizabethan beauty. Those red roses and white lilies evoke her coloration: red cheeks, red lips, white skin.
This metaphorical garden is so lovely, in fact, that the speaker sees it as nothing less than a "heav'nly paradise"—a new Garden of Eden in which "all pleasant fruits do flow." Note the sensuous delight in the speaker's language there. If all fruits "flow" from this garden, then there's an abundant river of them, all the fruit you can eat. More than that, the word "flow" hints at the trickle of sweet juices as a lucky visitor to this garden bites into a pear or a nectarine. The alliteration here sounds tasty, too: the ripe, plump /p/ sound of "paradise," "place," and "pleasant" meets the light, smooth /f/ sound of "fruits" and "flow."
The garden of this lady's face, in other words, might be lovely to experience not just with the eyes, but with the lips. One look or one kiss from her, the speaker suggests, and it's as if the Fall of Man never happened: you're right back in Paradise.
Meter and rhyme make it feel as if, gazing at this lady, the speaker is lost in a happy dream. The poem is written in iambic tetrameter—that is, lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds:
There is | a gar- | den in | her face
The poem pulses as steadily as a heartbeat. The alternating ABAB rhyme scheme in these first four lines also feels balanced and even, fitting for a description of a face as lovely as paradise.
This sestet isn't over yet, however. In the two closing lines of this stanza, the rhymes will switch to a firm CC couplet. Those changed lines will introduce the speaker's dilemma: the lady's paradisiacal face and its sweet fruits are out of his reach!
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Lines 5-6
There cherries grow which none may buy,
Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry. -
Lines 7-12
Those cherries fairly do enclose
Of orient pearl a double row,
Which when her lovely laughter shows,
They look like rose-buds fill'd with snow;
Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy,
Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry. -
Lines 13-18
Her eyes like angels watch them still,
Her brows like bended bows do stand,
Threat'ning with piercing frowns to kill
All that attempt with eye or hand
Those sacred cherries to come nigh,
Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
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“There Is a Garden in Her Face” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Conceit
Like any good Renaissance love poet, this speaker relies on an elaborate conceit—an extended metaphor—to describe a lady's loveliness (and, in the speaker's opinion, her cruelty). This metaphor appears in the poem's very first line: "There is a garden in her face."
If the lady's face is a garden, it's a "heav'nly" one, a new Eden. It overflows with "roses and white lilies," flowers that signal the ideals of Elizabethan beauty: pale skin, blushing cheeks, red lips. Those lips, in fact, are the crown jewel of the lady's garden. In a metaphor within a metaphor, the speaker describes them as "cherries"—cherries that, as he repeatedly laments, no one can taste until the lady's good and ready to share them.
The lady's face is thus both inviting and forbidding. As John Milton tells us, Paradise is long lost; if this lady's face is like Eden, it's thoroughly off limits. Angels—her eyes—watch over her face holding the "bended bows" of her eyebrows, ready to shoot down suitors with "piercing frowns."
The conceit of the heavenly garden thus gets at exactly what frustrates the speaker about this lady. She's endlessly lovely and alluring, but she's simply not willing to invite anyone in to enjoy the pleasures of her beauty.
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Simile
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Refrain
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Allusion
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Alliteration
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"There Is a Garden in Her Face" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Wherein
- Cherry ripe
- Orient
- Peer
- Nigh
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In which.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “There Is a Garden in Her Face”
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Form
"There is a Garden in Her Face" is a courtly Renaissance love song, originally set to music. Like many songs of its era, it has a lot of fun with an elaborate conceit in which the beloved is metaphorically presented as something desirable—in this case, a paradisiacal garden guarded by scowling angels. (This kind of metaphor became such a cliché that Shakespeare felt compelled to write a whole sonnet mocking it—though he did plenty of this kind of thing himself.)
Campion lays out his metaphor in three short, sweet sestets (or six-line stanzas). Those sestets always end with the poem's refrain, which reminds those who'd like to kiss the lady's cherry lips that they're going to have to wait until she's good and ready (which she might never be).
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Meter
This poem is written in iambic tetrameter. That means that each of its lines uses four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 1:
There is | a gar- | den in | her face
This pulse-like meter ticks along pretty steadily, with only a few variations for drama. For instance, listen to the moment in line 15 when the speaker describes his lady's eyebrows as drawn bows just waiting to shoot unwanted lovers down:
Threat'ning | with pierc- | ing frowns | to kill
The first foot there is an emphatic trochee, a foot with a DUM-da rhythm, the opposite of an iamb—and it emphasizes just how "threat'ning" those brows are.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem's rhyme scheme runs like this:
ABABCC
The rhyme's movement from the alternating ABAB pattern to the closing CC couplet sounds even more emphatic when you consider that the couplet always ends with the same line, the poem's refrain: "till 'Cherry ripe' themselves do cry."
This pattern of rhyme elegantly mirrors the poem's ideas. The swaying ABAB sections dreamily describe the lady's beauty (or her sternness); the concluding couplets rise up and put an end to all that, as firmly as this lady refuses unwanted kisses.
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“There Is a Garden in Her Face” Speaker
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The poem's speaker reveals nothing of their identity: this is a song about a beauteous lady, not about the person who sings about her. The speaker's intense focus on whether or not it might be time to kiss this lady's cherry lips, however, invites readers to imagine him as a figure like Campion himself: a Renaissance courtier indulging in a little romantic metaphor-making.
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“There Is a Garden in Her Face” Setting
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There's no clear literal setting in this poem: everything that happens here happens in the beautiful metaphorical garden of a lady's face. However, that elaborate metaphor itself suggests that this is a lady of Campion's own place and time: England around the turn of the 17th century. Comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison was one of a Renaissance courtier's favorite hobbies—though, as this poem suggests, it didn't necessarily get them anywhere with the ladies in question.
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Literary and Historical Context of “There Is a Garden in Her Face”
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Literary Context
Thomas Campion (1567-1620) was a courtier, poet, physician, and musician—in other words, a true Renaissance man. Most famous today for his "ayres" (that is, airs, songs for solo performance), he rose to prominence in the court of King James I by composing elaborate masques, spectacular performances that married music, drama, dance, and whizbang special effects.
"There is a garden in her face," originally set to music, is part of Campion's project to champion the simplicity of the solo air over the intricacies of the many-voiced madrigal (a form in fashion at the start of his career). He wished, he wrote, to compose "ear-pleasing songs without art"—that is, without stylish-but-mystifying complexity. His elegant songs (and his manifestos about music-making) altered the course of English songwriting.
Campion was a (close to exact) contemporary of William Shakespeare, and his poetry plays in the same fields: this poem's extended metaphor of a lady's face as a lovely garden fits right into a world in which lovers are summer days and human lives move like the seasons. This poem, first published in Campion's Third and Fourth Book of Ayres (1617), both adheres to and winks at the tropes of Renaissance love poetry.
Though Campion isn't quite so well known as his 800-pound literary gorilla of a contemporary, he left his mark, influencing later writers from T.S. Eliot (who called him "the most accomplished master of rhymed lyric of his time" besides Shakespeare) to W.H. Auden.
Historical Context
Thomas Campion lived through a turning point in English history: the transition between the reigns of "Good Queen Bess" (Elizabeth I, who died in 1603) and James I.
After a rocky start, Elizabeth stabilized an England thrown into turmoil by religious schism. Her father Henry VIII's decision to split from the Pope and found his own national Church of England led to generations of violent conflict between English Protestants and Catholics. Elizabeth's political skill, her dramatic military victories against the Spanish, and her canny decision to present herself as an almost supernatural, Artemis-like "Virgin Queen" all helped to create a new sense of English national identity in the midst of chaos.
She also became a symbol of ideal Renaissance femininity, from her makeup—stark white skin, red lips, red hair—to her stalwart virginity. Elizabeth consciously played the role of the Untouchable Woman, a role that the coy lady this poem describes also seems to be doing her best to fulfill. The English Renaissance was marked by male anxiety about women's desires; women were meant to stay chaste until marriage, but were also considered the more lustful and faithless of the sexes. A lady had to perform chaste virtue pretty hard to evade suspicion. The unmarried Elizabeth was the very image of a spotless lady.
When the Virgin Queen died and her cousin James (already James VI of Scotland) took the English throne, many of his new subjects at first regarded him with suspicion. He was a far less charismatic figure than his predecessor—and the son of the very Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots to boot (though he was himself a fervent Protestant convert). Worldly, intellectual, and superstitious all at once, James had a good eye for art, but was also pious in a rather paranoid way, anxious about demons and witches.
His court, however, would turn out to be a hothouse for poets and playwrights. James became the patron of everyone from Shakespeare to Donne, rewarding the artists in his employ with lavish commissions and important positions. James's discernment allowed Campion to rise from comparatively unremarkable London origins to wide renown.
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More “There Is a Garden in Her Face” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem as a Song — Listen to this poem set to music, as Campion intended.
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Two Books of Ayres — See images from one of Campion's collections of lute songs (or "airs"). "There is a Garden in her Face" was published in a later volume of the same series.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Thomas Campion's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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