There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies grow;
A heavenly paradise is that place
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.
There cherries grow which none may buy,
Till “cherry-ripe” themselves do cry.

These lines come from Thomas Campion’s lyric “There Is a Garden in Her Face,” a late-Elizabethan/Jacobean poem that also circulated as a song text. Campion (1567–1620) was a physician, poet, and composer closely associated with the English lute-song (ayre) tradition, in which short, highly patterned stanzas were set to music for courtly or domestic performance. The poem belongs to the era’s Petrarchan love-lyric mode, praising a woman’s beauty through elaborate natural imagery. The refrain-like “cherry-ripe” line evokes the marketplace cry of fruit sellers, blending refined courtly compliment with a vivid touch of everyday London soundscape.

The speaker turns the beloved’s face into an idealized “garden,” where roses and lilies stand for blush and pallor, and “pleasant fruits” suggest both sweetness and sensual allure. The conceit is not merely decorative: it frames beauty as a cultivated paradise that invites desire while remaining controlled and inaccessible. The final couplet sharpens this tension—“cherries” cannot be bought until they “cry” themselves “cherry-ripe,” implying that the beloved’s favors (a kiss, consent, intimacy) must be freely offered rather than purchased or coerced. Campion’s wit lies in yoking elevated pastoral imagery to a commercial street-cry, making erotic anticipation feel immediate, audible, and socially grounded.