Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air,
Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair,
Shine sun, burn fire, breathe air, and ease me,
Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me.

These lines are from George Peele’s lyric “A Farewell to Arms,” a late-Elizabethan poem spoken in the voice of an aging soldier who is laying aside martial life. The speaker contrasts the heat and glare of the battlefield (“hot sun,” “cool fire”) with the gentler, restorative forces of nature—air and shade—imagined almost as attendants. The repeated address to “Black shade, fair nurse” frames shade as a comforting caregiver, suggesting the soldier’s desire for rest after exertion and danger. The mention of “white hair” underscores the poem’s situation: a veteran at the end of his active life, turning from war toward quiet and, ultimately, death.

The lines are a compact Elizabethan lyric built on paradox and balanced antithesis: “hot” and “cool,” “shine” and “black shade,” “nurse” and “shroud.” The speaker asks nature’s elements—sun, fire, air, and shade—to both invigorate and soothe, suggesting a body (and spirit) worn by age (“white hair”) that still craves warmth and breath but also longs for relief and rest. Calling shade a “fair nurse” personifies darkness as a caretaker, while “shroud me” edges the plea toward death, as if the same gentle shade that comforts in life will finally cover the speaker in burial. The repeated imperatives give the stanza the feel of an incantation or refrain.