My Sweetest Lesbia (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Thomas Campion
- First Published: 1601
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Love or romance, War, Death or dying, Peace, Life and death, Mortality, Arms or weapons, Sleep
The Poem
“My Sweetest Lesbia” is a song composed of three stanzas, each six lines long, rhymed aabbcc. It is the first of Thomas Campion’s twenty-one songs in a collection shared equally with lutenist Philip Rosseter. Other songbooks of Campion’s era (those by John Dowland, for example) present arrangements for four-part singing, but Campion and Rosseter require a solo voice and a simple accompaniment in their works: a “naked ayre without guide, or prop, or color but his own.” As the first song in a group that primarily examines kinds of love (unrequited,...
[The entire page is 1536 words long]
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