Like so many anonymous lyrics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, “The Maidens Came” comes down to us in various iterations, bearing its freight of mystery. Though clearly a wedding song, in a bride’s voice, this tetrameter poem resonates with a note of lament: “How could I love and I so young?” The rhymed-couplet refrain pairs the imagery of castle walls with that of flowers, the lily and the rose, suggesting virginity offered and relinquished. Despite its troubled undertones, however, the poem’s rhyming and alliterative music remains insistently beguiling.

The Maidens Came 
by Anonymous 

The maidens came  
   When I was in my mother’s bower; 
I had all that I would. 
   The bailey beareth the bell away; 
   The lily, the rose, the rose I lay. 
 
The silver is white, red is the gold; 
The robes they lay in fold. 
   The bailey beareth the bell away; 
   The lily, the rose, the rose I lay. 
 
And through the glass window shines the sun. 
How could I love and I so young? 
   The bailey beareth the bell away; 
   The lily, the rose, the rose I lay. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, 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.