The Phoenix and the Turtle is a funeral poem for two birds whose love made them one, and it claims that with their deaths, truth and beauty have died out of the world.
The Phoenix and the Turtle: Full Poem
Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever’s end,
To this troop come thou not near.
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feathered king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Let the priest in surplice white,
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.
And thou treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak’st
With the breath thou giv’st and tak’st,
‘Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they loved, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seen
‘Twixt this turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix’ sight:
Either was the other’s mine.
Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was called.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together,
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded;
That it cried, “How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts can so remain.”
Whereupon it made this threne
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As chorus to their tragic scene.
THRENOS
Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclosed, in cinders lie.
Death is now the phoenix’ nest,
And the turtle’s loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,
Leaving no posterity:
‘Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.
Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but ’tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
Text from Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr (1601), with spelling and punctuation lightly modernized.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about The Phoenix and the Turtle for quick reference.
What The Phoenix and the Turtle Means
The poem is a funeral in three stages: the mourners gather, an anthem explains who has died, and a final lament stands over the grave.
The first five stanzas assemble the funeral. A bird with the loudest song, perched on the one Arabian tree where the phoenix lives, is to act as herald. The screech owl, a bird of ill omen, is banned, as are all birds of prey except the eagle, king of birds. The swan, which was believed to sing before it died, will be the priest. The long-lived crow is welcome among the mourners.
The anthem then announces the deaths. Love and constancy are dead: the phoenix and the turtledove have died together in a single flame. They loved so completely that, though they were two, they had one essence. There was distance between their hearts but no space. Each saw itself in the other. They were neither two nor one.
Reason itself watches this and is baffled. It sees separate things grow together, and it cries out that love has a logic reason cannot match. Reason then composes the Threnos, the funeral song that ends the poem.
The Threnos is plain and final. Beauty, truth, rarity and grace lie in the ashes. The phoenix’s nest is now death, and the pair left no children, not from weakness but because their marriage was chaste. From now on, truth can only seem true and beauty can only pretend. The poem ends by asking anyone who is true or beautiful to come to the urn and pray for the two dead birds.
The Phoenix and the Turtle Stanza by Stanza
Each stanza, identified by its first line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Themes
The poem is short, but it holds three large ideas: perfect union, the failure of reason, and a death with no renewal.
Two Become One
The heart of the poem is a love so complete that the lovers share a single essence while remaining two. “Two distincts, division none” says it most compactly: two separate beings with no separation between them. Stanza after stanza restates the idea in new terms, each one a paradox, because ordinary language assumes that two things are either one or two, and these lovers are neither.
Reason Defeated
Reason appears as a character, looks at the lovers, and cannot make sense of them. Its verdict is a surrender: “Love hath reason, reason none, / If what parts can so remain.” If things that separate can still stay whole, then love has its own logic and reason has none. The poem does not mock reason. It shows reason recognizing its own limit, and then, in a striking turn, it makes Reason the author of the lament that follows.
Death Without Renewal
The Threnos treats the lovers’ death as a loss to the whole world. Beauty, truth, rarity and grace are buried with them, and what remains is only the appearance of those qualities: “Truth may seem, but cannot be.” The poem offers no consolation, no afterlife and no heir. The pair left “no posterity,” and nothing in the poem suggests anything will replace them.
Form and Language
The Phoenix and the Turtle sounds unlike anything else Shakespeare wrote, and its form is a large part of the reason.
Meter and Rhyme
Almost every line has seven syllables in a falling rhythm that begins on a stress: “LET the BIRD of LOUD-est LAY.” This short trochaic line gives the poem the feel of a chant or a processional. The first thirteen stanzas rhyme ABBA, with the outer lines enclosing the inner pair. The Threnos changes to three-line stanzas that rhyme on a single sound (AAA), which makes the lament sound heavier and more final.
The Procession of Birds
The opening stanzas cast real birds in the roles of a funeral, drawing on traditional beliefs about each. The screech owl foretells death, so it is excluded. The swan was said to sing just before dying, so it becomes the priest. The crow was thought to live for centuries and to conceive by exchanging breath, so its “sable gender,” its black offspring, are made “with the breath thou giv’st and tak’st.” The ceremony is precise and formal, a fitting frame for the strange argument at its center.
The Language of Logic
The middle stanzas borrow the vocabulary of philosophy and law: “essence,” “distincts,” “number,” “property,” “simple,” “compounded,” even “session” and “interdict.” These are words for defining and classifying things, and the poem uses them to describe something that cannot be classified. “Number there in love was slain” plays on an old saying that one is not a number at all, a saying Shakespeare also uses in Sonnet 136: “Among a number one is reckoned none.”
Paradox
“Hearts remote, yet not asunder.” “Distance and no space.” “Neither two nor one.” “To themselves yet either neither.” The central stanzas are built almost entirely from paradoxes, each a statement that contradicts itself. They are not decoration. They are the only way the poem can describe the lovers, since any plain statement would make them either one thing or two.
The Threnos
“Threnos” is Greek for a lament, and “threne,” its English form, appears in the stanza that introduces it. After the tangled paradoxes of the anthem, the Threnos is short, plain and weighty. Its lines read almost like an epitaph carved on a tomb, ending with an instruction to the living.
A Closer Reading
The poem kills the one creature in legend that was supposed to be unkillable, and then tells its survivors they can now be only half of what the lovers were.
In legend the phoenix never truly dies. It burns in its nest and rises again from its own ashes, the one bird of its kind, forever renewed. Shakespeare’s poem takes that promise away line by line. The lovers flee “in a mutual flame,” but nothing rises. “Death is now the phoenix’ nest”: the place of rebirth has become the grave. And the Threnos is explicit: they left “no posterity.” The bird whose whole meaning was self-renewal ends in an urn.
What dies with them is not only love but a combination. The phoenix and the turtle were truth and beauty joined, the one faithful, the other rare and fair, so fused that no one could tell them apart. The Threnos names both qualities, then separates them: “Truth may seem, but cannot be; / Beauty brag, but ’tis not she.” With the union gone, the two qualities survive only as imitations, truth that merely seems and beauty that merely boasts.
That makes the last lines exact. The urn is for “those … that are either true or fair.” Either one, or the other. The mourners are defined by having only half of what the lovers had. No one left in the world is both, because the only two who were are in the ashes. Their prayer is not for the lovers’ souls; it is the grief of people who know they are incomplete.
Set beside Shakespeare’s sonnets, the poem’s position is striking. The Procreation Sonnets urge a young man to have children so that beauty survives, and poems like Sonnet 18 promise that verse will keep beauty alive. The Phoenix and the Turtle refuses both. Its lovers choose “married chastity” and leave no heir, and the poem itself makes no claim to preserve them. It records the loss and lets it stand.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about The Phoenix and the Turtle, answered briefly.
What Is The Phoenix and the Turtle About?
It is a funeral for a phoenix and a turtledove who loved each other so completely that they became one. Their deaths, the poem says, have taken truth and beauty out of the world.
What Does “Turtle” Mean in the Title?
A turtledove, not a tortoise or sea turtle. The turtledove was a traditional symbol of faithful love, because it was believed to mate for life.
Who Are the Phoenix and the Turtle?
No one knows for certain. Love’s Martyr was dedicated to Sir John Salusbury, and one leading theory connects the birds to Salusbury and his wife. Others have read the phoenix as Queen Elizabeth I, who was often associated with that bird. Many readers treat the poem simply as an allegory of ideal love.
Where Was The Phoenix and the Turtle First Published?
In 1601, in a collection of “Poetical Essays” printed at the end of Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr. Other contributors included Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston. Shakespeare’s poem appeared without a title, signed “William Shake-speare.”
What Does “Number There in Love Was Slain” Mean?
Their love abolished counting. It plays on an old saying that one is not a number: because the two lovers were one, there was no longer any number between them.
Related Works
Three sonnets take up the same questions of perfect love, posterity and what survives death.