"Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
Yet slower yet, oh faintly gentle springs:
List to the heavy part the music bears,
Woe weeps out her division when she sings.
Droop herbs and flowers;
Fall grief in showers;
Our beauties are not ours:
Oh, I could still,
Like melting snow upon some craggy hill,
Drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature's pride is, now, a withered daffodil."

In this poem, the speaker is the mythical character, Echo. And she's weeping for the death of her love, Narcissus. You know, like any good lover would.

Echo and Narcissus sure get around as far as classical allusions go. They feature in a great many Renaissance poems—epic or otherwise—and plays. That's largely due to the lasting power of unrequited love and the poignancy of grief, which were the real foci of the myth of Echo and Narcissus.

A tale for the ages, indeed.

The rhyme scheme seems to parallel Echo's weeping perfectly. Most notably, "flowers," "showers," and "ours" sounds pretty "ow, ow, ow my heart" to us. And the onomatopoetic "drop, drop, drop, drop" that puddles into the poem's concluding line sounds a lot like crying, too.