The tradition of carpe diem — Latin for 'seize the day,' from Horace's Odes — runs through Renaissance love poetry with particular urgency. The argument is always the same: time passes, youth fades, love is seasonal, the present moment is the only one you own. Use it. The tradition gave English poetry some of its most compressed, beautiful expressions: Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress,' Herrick's 'To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,' Spenser's Epithalamion. Shakespeare is working in that company.

What makes 'It was a lover and his lass' extraordinary is how lightly it holds the argument. Most carpe diem poems are urgent, even anxious — the grave is coming, time is running, hurry. This song barely seems to notice the urgency. The refrain ('with a hey, and a ho, and a hey-nonny-no') keeps pulling the verse back from philosophy into sound, into the nonsense joy of birdsong. The one truly weighty line — 'How that a life was but a flower' — arrives and departs in a breath, swallowed by 'hey ding a ding, ding.'

The effect is carpe diem as it feels rather than as it argues. The song doesn't tell you life is short; it gives you the feeling of being in a green cornfield in spring with someone you love and a refrain that sounds like birds. The philosophical conclusion — 'therefore take the present time' — is not the song's peak; it's its quiet resolution. The feeling came first.

This is also why Touchstone's dismissal misses the point. He calls it a 'foolish song' — and by the standards of argument, wit, and substance, he's not wrong. The song proves nothing. It contains no insight that would survive a Touchstone-style interrogation. But some things aren't meant to survive interrogation. Some things are meant to be felt for three minutes on a spring evening, and 'It was a lover and his lass' knows exactly what it is.

Scene 5-3 is the smallest scene in the play's final act — barely 30 lines, almost no plot, two unnamed characters who appear once and never again. It is also, in structural terms, one of the most important scenes Shakespeare wrote for this play. It is the forest's goodbye.

By the time we reach Act 5, the world of Arden is closing. The plot is resolving: Orlando knows Rosalind, Oliver and Celia have fallen in love, Silvius and Phoebe will be settled, the weddings are tomorrow. The exiled court that spent the middle of the play learning to love the forest is about to go back to the court. Frederick has been converted off-stage. Duke Senior's authority will be restored. The magical alternative world — where rank mattered less, where poetry was possible, where the seasons were the only government — is ending.

Shakespeare inserts this scene, with its song about spring and ring-time, at exactly the moment before the finale. It's the forest speaking one last time in its own language: not argument, not plot, but lyric. The 'hey-nonny-no' refrain that sounds like birds is Arden itself, rendered as sound.

Touchstone's dismissal — 'time lost,' 'foolish song' — is the voice of the world the characters are about to return to: the court world, where songs are evaluated for wit and 'no great matter in the ditty' is a legitimate critique. The Pages don't argue back much. They've said what needed saying. The song is its own argument.

There's a reason this scene comes just before 5-4, the play's most densely plotted scene. Shakespeare is placing them in deliberate contrast: last lyric moment, then finale. The forest sings itself off the stage.