Much Renaissance love poetry uses extended metaphors or other figures of speech as a means of talking about love or sexuality. One charming example is Thomas Campion’s song “There Is a Garden in Her Face,” in which the beauties of the narrator's beloved are compared to a beautiful garden, with her skin being compared to lilies, as pale skin was considered especially beautiful in that period, and her lips to roses. The final two lines of the stanza are:
There cherries grow which none may buy,
Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
On a literal level, we get a sense of the woman making some sort of choice. On the figurative level, the term "cherry" is slang for virginity and ripening suggests sexual maturity. Thus what is being said on the figurative level has nothing to do with a woman growing and selling fruit, but rather is saying that the woman herself decides when to give away her virginity.
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