The second act of Shakespeare’s comedy “As You Like It” finds the play’s central characters exiled or fleeing the court of the usurping Duke Frederick, to wander lost in the Forest of Arden. In Shakespearean drama, the forest functions as a disordered place whose spirit of misrule, paradoxically, allows room for some right order to reassert itself. Here, in Arden, amid various amorous confusions, the exiled Duke Senior reconstitutes his faithful retinue.  
 
Amiens, one of that retinue, is given to bursts of song. His companion, a nobleman named Jacques, is given to mood swings, which provide a counterpoint to Amiens’ songs. When Amiens sings a merry song about free love in the greenwood, Jacques begs for more, to work himself into a satisfying depression. “I can suck melancholy out of a song,” he boasts, “as a weasel sucks eggs.”  

Two acts later, Jacques, in a state of manic exaltation, babbles about having “met a fool in the forest,” vows to become a fool himself, pontificating that “all the world’s a stage.” Amiens responds with a song about the bitterness of ingratitude. Their antiphonal exchanges in speech and song do nothing to serve the play’s action, except to offer the commentary of a small, essentially ineffectual Greek chorus. Yet they also highlight the paradoxical strangeness of the forest, where things turn upside-down, sometimes several times, before they right themselves.
 
Where “Under the Greenwood Tree” laughs at “winter and rough weather,” the second song, “Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind,” sees the season as less wintery than human nature. Its iambic trimeter stanzas (“Blow, blow, thou winter wind”), with their aabccb rhymes, end with a refrain of two tetrameter and two trimeter lines, in which the happy greenwood of the earlier song gives way to the prickling, unfriendly leaves of the holly.

“This life is most jolly,” sings Amiens, who in this moment seems to have traded personalities with Jacques. His cynical rhyming, which links jolly with both holly and folly, indicates the sardonic tone on which the song ends.  

Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind 
by William Shakespeare 
 
Blow, blow, thou winter wind, 
   Thou art not so unkind 
      As man’s ingratitude; 
   Thy tooth is not so keen, 
Because thou art not seen, 
      Although thy breath be rude. 
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: 
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: 
   Then, heigh-ho, the holly! 
      This life is most jolly. 
 
   Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, 
   That dost not bite so nigh 
      As benefits forgot: 
   Though thou the waters warp, 
      Thy sting is not so sharp 
      As friend remembered not. 
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: 
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: 
   Then, heigh-ho, the holly! 
      This life is most jolly. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.