Shakespeare's forest song promises no enemy except the weather
Come and lie under the trees, the singer urges, and whistle along with the birds. Out here the only foes are winter and rough weather. Shakespeare's short song is an invitation to drop ambition altogether, written by a man who spent his own working life chasing success in the London theatre.
The song has two stanzas built on the same frame. Each begins with a portrait of the kind of person who belongs in the greenwood, then breaks into a triple summons, come hither three times over, and ends on the same refrain: here he will meet no enemy "But winter and rough weather." The repetition is part of the charm. It sounds like something sung by several voices around a fire, easy to join in on the second time through.
The first stanza offers music and idleness. The listener is invited to lie down beside the singer and tune his merry note to a bird's throat, as if human song and birdsong could become one sound. The second stanza turns ethical. Its ideal companion shuns ambition, loves living in the sun, forages for his own food and is content with whatever he finds. Against the plotting and status games of court or city, the forest is imagined as a place where need is small and satisfaction easy.
The joke hidden in the refrain is that the pastoral life is not actually painless. Winter and rough weather are real hardships, and the song admits it cheerfully. Its claim is subtler: natural discomfort is easier to bear than human malice, because weather has no motive.
Its author knew the other world well. Sometime between 1585 and 1592 Shakespeare built a career in London as actor, writer and sharer, or part-owner, of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company renamed the King's Men after James VI of Scotland took the English throne. Around 1613, at about 49, he appears to have retired to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he died three years later, on 23 April 1616. A man who wrote about shunning ambition went home, in the end, to the countryside.
Source: PoetryDB — Under the Greenwood Tree · Public domain (GB: author died 1616, life+70 expired; US: author died 1616, so every lifetime publication is from 1930 or earlier)
