LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,103)
  • Text Authors (19,450)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,114)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by Francis Quarles (1592 - 1644)

Our life is nothing but a winter's day
Language: English 
Our life is nothing but a winter's day:
Some only break their fast, and so away:
Others stay dinner and depart full-fed:
The deepest age but sups and goes to bed:
He's most in debt that lingers out the day:
Who dies betimes has less and less to pay.

Available sung texts:   ← What is this?

•   E. Maconchy 

About the headline (FAQ)

View text with all available footnotes

Confirmed with Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, by William Shepard Walsh, Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1893, p. 550.


Text Authorship:

  • by Francis Quarles (1592 - 1644), no title, appears in Divine Fancies: digested into epigrammes, meditations, and observations, first published 1633 [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Elizabeth Maconchy (1907 - 1994), "Our life is nothing but a winter's day", 1975 [chorus], from Two Epitaphs, no. 1. [
     text verified 1 time
    ]

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website: 2012-02-13
Line count: 6
Word count: 51

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris