Discovering poetry: for the love of life

Pointing you cheerfully in the direction of Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament might be a bit like suggesting you hold your toddler’s birthday party in a funeral parlour, but do please bear with me on this. Yes, Nashe’s verses are basically about the fact that we’re all going to die – and that even when we’re having the most fun we’re still jigging a danse macarbe to the grim reaper’s jolly tune. But how prettily he says it!

Flippancy aside, Nashe’s poem is at heart a cry of carpe diem. It’s from a play he wrote in 1593 to entertain the Archbishop of Canterbury when he was living in Croydon to escape the plague. Tough times, as anyone who’s been to Croydon will easily understand. And yet the play is a good-natured comedy in which, as harvest approaches, the passing season of Summer calls his servants together (springtime, the sun, even Orion the hunter), and like a good employer tries to get them to present their financial accounts.