Thou in the fields walk’st out thy supping hours And yet thou swear’st thou hast supped like a king; Like Nebuchadnezar perchance with grass and flowers, A salad worse then Spanish dieting.
Where this text comes from
First published in Sir John Simeon, ed., Unpublished Poems of Donne (1856–7), as “Supping Hours”. This date is uncertain. Not in any of the old editions of the Poems. Grierson's commentary states that this epigram was first printed in Simeon's collection, whence Chambers took it into his Appendix A, and that the title used here comes from the Harleian manuscript. Simeon's volume has not been seen here, and Grierson dates it across two years, so the year is marked uncertain. Gosse also prints the poem in The Life and Letters of John Donne (1899), vol. I, p. 52. [1] [2]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/john-donne_poetry, epigrams.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (3)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L4.
Cite this poem
John Donne (1572–1631).
“The Liar.” First published in Sir John Simeon, ed., Unpublished Poems of Donne (1856–7), as “Supping Hours”.
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/john-donne/the-liar/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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