Well then; I now do plainly see
This busy world and I shall ne’er agree;
The very honey of all earthly joy
Does of all meats the soonest cloy,
And they (methinks) deserve my pity,
Who for it can endure the stings,
The crowd, and buzz and murmurings,
Of this great hive, the city.

These lines come from Abraham Cowley’s celebrated retirement poem “The Wish,” written in the aftermath of England’s civil and political upheavals and Cowley’s own weary experience of public life. Cowley had served the royalist cause and spent years in exile during the Interregnum; after the Restoration (1660) he sought a quieter existence and withdrew to the countryside (notably at Chertsey). In this poem he contrasts the noisy, competitive “busy world” of court and city with the peace of rural privacy, using the metaphor of the city as a teeming hive whose honey is purchased at the cost of stings and incessant buzzing.

Cowley frames worldly pleasure as “honey” that quickly becomes cloying—sweetness that turns to satiety and disgust. The city, imagined as a hive, promises reward but demands endurance of pain (“stings”), congestion (“crowd”), and constant social noise (“buzz and murmurings”). The speaker’s “pity” for those who tolerate this bargain implies a moral and psychological critique: ambition and urban sociability trap people in restless labor for fleeting satisfactions. The passage crystallizes a common seventeenth-century theme—retirement from public striving into contemplative, rural life—while also sounding strikingly modern in its sense of overstimulation and burnout.