Cherry and the Arts

So many poems and paintings use the striking imagery of the cherry...for love, for color, for sweetness, for analogy, for spring and renewal.  

Thomas Champion
(...) A garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies grow;
A heav'nly paradise is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.
There cherries grow, which none may buy
Till 'Cherry ripe' themselves do cry"
(Fourth Book of Airs, 1617).

Robert Herrick's poem, "Cherry-ripe" (1648):
Cherry-ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry,
Full and fair ones; come and buy.
If so be you ask me where
They do grow, I answer: There,
Where my Julia's lips do smile;
There's the land, or cherry-isle,
Whose plantations fully show
All the year where cherries grow.

A. E. Housman's Shropshire Lad (1887):
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Matsua Basho (1644-1694)
A world of memory
returns to me when I see
blossoming cherries
(from The Knapsack Notebook )

Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, ll. 1101-3
When he was by, the birds such pleasure took,
That some would sing, some other in their bills
Would bring him mulberries and ripe-red cherries
 
Ome Shushiki (1668-1725)
Be careful! Be careful!
Of the cherry tree by the well
You're drunk with sake!