Where the bee sucks, there suck I

Origin

From Shakespeare's The Tempest, 1610:

ARIEL [sings]

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

The practise of printers up until around 1780 of elongating 's' characters to look rather like lowercase f's have lead to versions of Shakespeare's work that we now snigger at; like this Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, printed in 1762, in which Shakespeare's lines were included:

See other phrases and sayings from Shakespeare.