Songs of Youth and Pleasure

Shake off your heavy trance
and leap into the dance!
Fit only for Apollo to play to,
for the moon to lead and the stars to follow.

Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question; 
you will not deprive her of that right at least. Tell me, 
what gives you sovereign empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? 
Your talents?
Man alone has raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle. 
Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated – 
in a century of enlightenment and wisdom – into the crassest ignorance, 
he wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession 
of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution 
and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it.

Pluck the fruit and taste the pleasure,
youthful lordings, of delight;
whilst occasion gives you seizure,
feed your fancies and your sight;
after death, when you are gone,
joy and pleasure is there none.

Here on earth nothing is stable,
Fortune's changes well are known;
whilst as youth doth then enable,
let your seeds of joy be sown:
after death, when you are gone,
joy and pleasure is there none.

 ... 

My love bound me with a kiss
  That I should no longer stay;
When I felt so sweet a bliss
  I had less power to part away:
Alas, that women doth not know
Kisses make men loath to go.

Yes, she knows it but too well,
  For I heard when Venus’ dove
In her ear did softly tell
  That kisses were the seals of love:
O muse not then though it be so,
Kisses make men loath to go.

Wherefore did she thus inflame
  My desires heat my blood,
Instantly to quench the same
  And starve whom she had given food?
I the common sense can show,
Kisses make men loath to go.

Had she bid me go at first
  It would ne’er have grieved my heart,
Hope delayed had been the worst;
  But ah to kiss and then to part!
How deep it struck, speak, gods, you know
Kisses make men loath to go.

Hey nonny no!
Men are fools that wish to die.
Is't not fine to dance and sing
When the bells of death do ring?
Is't not fine to swim in wine,
And turn upon the toe
And sing Hey nonny no,
while the winds blow
and the seas flow?
Hey nonny no!
Hey nonny no!