This Life, Which Seems So Fair
by William Drummond

Scottish poet. The main collections of his verse are Poems, Amorous, Funereal, Divine, Pastoral, in Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals (1616), The Muses Welcome (1618), and Flowers of Sion (1623), which includes the religious sonnets 'For the Magdalene' and 'Saint John Baptist'. He spent many years writing a History of Scotland 1423-1524, and another notable prose work is A Cypress Grove (1623), a meditation on death. His notes on Ben Jonson's conversation were published in 1832.

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This Life, Which Seems So Fair
by William Drummond

This Life, which seems so fair,
Is like a bubble blown up in the air
By sporting children's breath,
Who chase it everywhere
And strive who can most motion it bequeath.
And though it sometimes seem of its own might
Like to an eye of gold to be fixed there,
And firm to hover in that empty height,
That only is because it is so light.
But in that pomp it doth not long appear;
For when 'tis most admired, in a thought,
Because it erst was nought, it turns to nought.

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This Life, Which Seems So Fair by William Drummond