From Notes by Joseph Dubiel:
"Babbitt's ideal of more than one thing happening at a time is manifested in the Four Cavalier Settings (1991) only apparently cavalier setting of their texts' obvious patterns. The very obviousness of the patterns—the unvarying "Ask me no more . . . For" of Carew's Song, the rhyme characteristically retarding each stanza of Herrick's Anacreontic just as it starts ("I must/Not trust")—can be relied on to make the patterns audible in counterpoint to music that does not "double" their repetitions with repetitions of its own. But meanwhile—and consequently—a lot of the fun of hearing the Settings is noticing the little musical moves that interact offhandedly with the text. One common move (something of a Babbitt mannerism, even) is the interpolation of short rests around words that are to be heard with some significance besides their obvious one—for instance, those that transform "I'm sick of love," at the beginning of Herrick's To Sycamores, into "I'm sick . . . of . . . love," making the little internal rhyme more audible, and at the same time making the formulaic complaint starker. Something more extended and important is Babbitt's varying of the degree to which the first short lines are set off in the Anacreontic, a procedure which has its final payoff when these rhymes spill into the rest of the stanza at the end of the poem: "But he/Whom we/See rejected . . ." (We pass in silence over the treatment of this poem's conclusion.) This kind of counterpoint is inherent in the texts, too, of course: as easy to hear as the pattern of meter and rhyme in Herrick's To Electra is the way the grammar and sense overrun this pattern in the poem's third quarter—and this the music matches as nicely as can be."

FOUR CAVALIER SETTINGS, Milton Babbitt

to electra

I dare not ask a kiss,
I dare not beg a smile,
Lest having that or this
I might grow proud the while.
No, no, the utmost share
Of my desire shall be
Only to kiss that air
That lately kissèd thee.
-Robert Herrick (1591–1674)

a song

Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauty’s orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.
Ask me no more whither doth stray
The golden atoms of the day;
For in pure love heaven did prepare
Those powders to enrich your hair.
Ask me no more whither doth haste
The nightingale when May is past;
For in your sweet dividing throat
She winters and keeps warm her note.
Ask me no more where those stars light
That downwards fall in dead of night;
For in your eyes they sit, and there
Fixèd become as in their sphere.
Ask me no more if east or west
The phoenix builds her spicy nest;
For unto you at last she flies,
And in your fragrant bosom dies.
-Thomas Carew (1594–1640)

anacreontic
I must
Not trust
Here to any;
Bereaved,
Deceived
By so many:
As one
Undone
By my losses,
Comply
Will I
With my crosses.
Yet still
I will
Not be grieving
Since
thence
And hence
Comes relieving.
But this
Sweet is
In our mourning:
Times bad
And sad
Are a turning;
And he
Whom we
See dejected
Next day
we may
See erected.

-Robert Herrick


to sycamores

I’m sick of love; O let me lie
Under your shades, to sleep or die!
Either is welcome, so I have
Or here my bed or here my grave.
Why do you sigh, and sob, and keep
Time with the tears that I do weep?
Say, have ye sense, or do you prove
What crucifixions are in love?
I know ye do; and that’s the why
You sigh for love as well as I.

-Robert Herrick