The speaker's proposal is simple, and the argument he dresses it in is clever: life is short, so make love now, and don't get caught. The first half of the poem is the old carpe diem appeal. The last four lines turn that appeal into something sneakier, a piece of moral bookkeeping in which the only real wrong is being found out.
Jonson was adapting Catullus, the Latin poet whose famous invitation to his Lesbia makes the same plea. The sunset image in the second stanza clearly echoes the Latin. This song is also sung in Jonson's play *Volpone*, by the title character to a woman named Celia, who does not give in. Knowing that, the poem reads differently. It is a seducer's speech, and its smoothness is part of what we should be wary of.
The sound of the poem does much of the persuading. Each line has seven syllables, falling into a quick, light trochaic beat: COME my CE-lia LET us PROVE. The missing final syllable makes every line end on a stressed word, so the lines land firmly, like small decisive taps. Rhymed couplets run all the way through, and they give the argument a feeling of neat inevitability. "Forever" snaps shut against "sever," "vain" against "again." The third stanza stretches to six lines, and that extra length makes its questions feel breathless and restless. The final stanza drops back to four, as if the speaker has found his punchline.
The imagery shows how he thinks. Time is a person, "He," who gives gifts and will "at length our good will sever." Those gifts can be "spent" and wasted "in vain," so love becomes a kind of currency running out. The sun image then raises the stakes. Ordinary suns "set" and "rise again," but human light, once lost, means "perpetual night." The compression is striking. In two couplets the poem moves from an afternoon's pleasure to death, and that is how the speaker makes his request feel urgent.
The vocabulary shifts in the third stanza. "Fame and rumour" are dismissed as "toys," meaning trifles, and anyone who might disapprove becomes "a few poor household spies." The word "poor" is quietly contemptuous. These watchers are easily "deluded," and the poem piles up words for trickery: "delude," "beguile," "wile." Judging by the wording, the "spies" are people in the household, and "his easier ears" suggests someone even simpler to fool. The speaker never doubts that deception will work, and he never considers that the person he is courting might have doubts of her own.
The last stanza is where the argument becomes most interesting. "'Tis no sin love's fruits to steal," he says, and the metaphor is deliberately lighthearted: fruit is sweet, taking it is a harmless prank, and the theft is "sweet." Then comes the twist. What counts as wrong is "the sweet theft to reveal, / To be taken, to be seen." The three verbs, *reveal, taken, seen*, all describe exposure rather than action. "Sin" belongs to conscience and religion, while "crimes accounted" belongs to courts and ledgers, so the speaker has quietly swapped one kind of morality for another. The doing is innocent, he claims, and only the discovery is guilty. It is a neat piece of sophistry, and the tidy rhyme of "seen" and "been" makes it sound like common sense.
The poem is significant for how much it packs into so few lines. It takes a classical argument and gives it a compact, polished English form, with a plain style that never feels clumsy. It is also a good lesson in how rhetoric works. The ideas of seizing the moment and of time's cruelty are real and moving, but they are used here as leverage. Read alone, the song is charming. Read with its context, it shows how charm can be a form of pressure, and the tension between those two readings is a large part of why it still holds attention.