Get up, sweet Slug-a-bed, and see
The dew bespangling herb and tree.

These lines open Robert Herrick’s lyric “Corinna’s Going a-Maying,” a Cavalier-era poem that urges a beloved (Corinna) to rise early and join the May Day festivities. Written in the milieu of early Stuart England, the poem reflects seasonal folk customs—gathering greenery, dancing, and communal celebration—alongside Herrick’s characteristic carpe diem sensibility. Herrick, an Anglican clergyman and poet, often blended pastoral imagery with social ritual, using the freshness of morning and spring as a setting for persuasion: the speaker chides “Slug-a-bed” for lingering in sleep while nature and the day’s pleasures are at their peak.

The speaker’s playful rebuke—“sweet Slug-a-bed”—turns laziness into a teasing endearment, while the image of dew “bespangling” plants makes morning appear jeweled and fleeting. The couplet functions as an invitation and a warning: beauty is most vivid at dawn, and delay means missing it. In the larger poem, this becomes a moralized celebration of youth and opportunity—an argument that time and seasons move on regardless of human hesitation. Herrick’s diction heightens the sensual immediacy of the natural world, using the transient dew as a symbol for pleasures that vanish if not seized.