SOURCE: Ing, Catherine. “The Lyrics of Thomas Campion.” In Elizabethan Lyrics: A Study in the Development of English Metres and Their Relation to Poetic Effect, pp. 151-77. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968.

[In the essay that follows, Ing examines six poems of Campion's in terms of his poetic theories. Ing also looks at the importance of the accompanying music to Campion's poems in determining their form and content.]

It will be illuminating to take six, very varied, poems by Campion, examine each in the light of his own theories, and then consider whether there are in them elements of versification not mentioned in his theories.

1 “ROSE-CHEEKT LAWRA”

(FROM THE OBSERUATIONS IN THE ART OF ENGLISH POESIE, 1602)

          Rose-cheekt Lawra, come
Sing thou smoothly with thy beawties
Silent musick, either other
                                                            Sweetely gracing.
          Lovely formes do flowe
From concent devinely framed;
Heav'n is musick, and thy beawties
                                                            Birth is heavenly.
          These dull notes we sing
Discords neede for helps to grace them;
Only beawty purely loving
                                                  Knowes no discord,
          But still moves delight,
Like cleare springes renu'd by flowing,
Ever perfet, ever in them-
                                                            selves eternall.

It should be easy to decide what is the intended effect of this poem, for ‘Rose-Cheeket Lawra’ occurs in the Obseruations as the example of the second kind of English Sapphic. Campion says that it ‘consists of Dimeter, whose first foote may either be a Sponde or a Trochy’. The Dimeter he has described earlier as being ‘of two feete and one odde sillable. The first foote may be made either a Trochy, or a Spondee, or an Iambick, at the pleasure of the composer, though most naturally that place affects a Trochy or Spondee; yet, by the example of Catullus in his Hendicasillables, I adde in the first place sometimes an Iambick foote. In the second place we must ever insert a Trochy or Tribrack, and so leave the last sillable (as in the end of a verse it is alwaies held) common’. ‘The two verses following are both of them Trochaical, and consist of foure feete, the first of either of them being a Spondee or Trochy, the other three only Trochyes. The fourth and last verse is made of two Trochyes.’ It seems quite clear that Campion is here using the names of feet in the strict sense, and therefore expects us to look for a quantitative pattern independent of stress.

The first line of each stanza agrees punctiliously with the pattern described for the dimeter. He does not even allow himself the freedom of using an iamb in the first place. At first sight this foot in the last stanza might seem to be an iamb but, according to his rules of position, the ‘but’ is lengthened by the following three consonants in the combined words ‘but’, ‘still’; the foot must therefore be accepted, so long as we accept his terms, as a spondee.

Even for those readers who cannot automatically apply the detailed rules of syllable length given at the end of the Obseruations, it is quite easy to read this poem as a trochaic measure. Campion has used a large number of adjectival and adverbial forms ending in ‘-y’, and these forms are certainly always pronounced with a length in the first syllable much greater than that in the second. ‘Smoothly’, ‘Sweetely’, ‘Lovely’, ‘beawty’, ‘purely’, are words which come probably as near as possible to the strict trochaic shape of a long followed by a short in the ratio of two to one. It is therefore perfectly simple to scan a line like—

Sing thou smoothly with thy beawties

as consisting of trochees from beginning to end, and this is probably how any unprepared reader would scan it. Campion, however, would probably call the first foot a spondee as it seems likely that he would consider ‘thou’ lengthened by position. The last syllable of ‘beawties’ he certainly considered long: ‘The last sillable of all words in the plurall number that have two or more vowels before s are long, as vertues, duties, miseries, fellowes.’ These liberties are in complete accord with his instructions; so this line and, in fact, all the lines on this pattern in the poem, can be read in a manner satisfying to the ear, and still theoretically agree with his rules about individual syllables. The only difficulty that is likely to arise is that the satisfactory reading of the line will omit some of his points of detail, and therefore not quite achieve his intended effect.

On the whole, however, the poem in reading, even by a comparatively careless reader, will come very near to the poem that Campion wrote, for it is noticeable that nearly all his long syllables have their length reinforced by the natural stress of English speech.

2 “COME, LET US SOUND WITH MELODY”

(NO. XXI OF THE FIRST PART OF A BOOKE OF AYRES, 1601)

Come, let us sound with melody, the praises
Of the kings king, th'omnipotent creator,
Author of number, that hath all the world in
                                                                                Harmonie framed.
Heav'n is His throne perpetually shining,
His devine power and glorie, thence he thunders,
One in all, and all still in one abiding,
                                                                                          Both Father and Sonne.
O sacred sprite, invisible, eternall
Ev'ry where, yet unlimited, that all things
Canst in one moment penetrate, revive me,
                                                                      O holy Spirit.
Rescue, O rescue me from earthly darknes,
Banish hence all these elementall obiects,
Guide my soule that thirsts to the lively Fountaine
                                                                                Of thy devinenes.
Cleanse my soule, O God, thy bespotted Image,
Altered with sinne so that heav'nly purenes
Cannot acknowledge me, but in thy mercies,
                                                                      O Father of grace.
But when once thy beames do remove my darknes,
O then I'le shine forth as an Angell of light,
And record, with more than an earthly voice, thy
                                                                      Infinite honours.

In his scrupulous determination to join words and notes lovingly together, Campion has given us, in the music for this poem, a definite indication of the scansion. The notes are:

h q h h h q q h q h h
h q h h h q q h q h h
h q h h h q q h q h h
                                        h q q h w

This gives us, in the terms of prosody, three lines of the pattern, – s – – – s s – s – –, followed by a short fourth line, – s s – –. These lines are easily divisible into strict classical feet, the long ones consisting of trochee, spondee, dactyl, trochee, spondee, or: – s / – – / – s s / – s / – – ; and the short one of a dactyl followed by a spondee, or: – s s / – –.

Now it is easy to keep to this line in singing, when the notation indicates the precise value to be assigned to each syllable, and comparison of the syllables with the rules given in the Obseruations makes it clear that Campion has taken great care to give each long of the musical and metrical pattern a syllable, either long in itself or lengthened by position. In some cases the pattern shows itself instantly through the words: the line—

And record, with more than an earthly voice, thy

would usually be spoken in an arrangement of longs and shorts corresponding to the indicated feet; the lengthening of ‘And’, which he ascribes to the effect of massed following consonants, would almost certainly be supplied, as most readers hesitate to run too many short syllables together, and the short ‘re-’ tends to give length to the preceding word. This is, indeed, a kind of ‘lengthening by position’, but not quite in the same sense as Campion understands it. It is, however, difficult to see how the reading voice, if it is unrestrained by musical exigencies, is to be dissuaded from precipitating itself off ‘thy’ on to ‘Infinite’, before the metre is ready for it.

Difficulties of this kind are more evident in other parts of the poem. ‘Of’ occurs twice in a position requiring a long syllable, and it is lengthened only by a following ‘th-’. Again, two words, ‘Both Father’, are intended to make up a dactyl, and it requires strong self-discipline to read ‘Both’ as though it were twice as long as the first syllable of ‘Father’. It is clear, then, that he has remembered his rule that ‘position … can alter the accent of any sillable in our English verse’ more strongly than the principle that ‘above all the accent of our words is diligently to be observ'd, for chiefely by the accent … the true value of the sillables is to be measured’. Given a carefully trained reader, Campion himself, for instance, the rules would provide sufficient guide for overriding the accent. With an untrained reader, the question is bound to arise whether the form of the poem is adequately held together by Campion's rules alone.

3 “THE MAN OF LIFE UPRIGHT”

(NO. II IN THE FIRST PART OF TWO BOOKES OF AYRES, C. 1613)

The man of life upright,
          Whose chearfull minde is free
From waight of impious deedes
          And yoake of vanitee;
The man whose silent dayes
          In harmless ioyes are spent,
Whom hopes cannot delude
          Nor sorrowes discontent;
That man needes neyther towres,
          Nor armour for defence:
Nor vaults his guilt to shrowd
          From thunders violence;
Hee onely can behold
          With unaffrighted eyes
The horrors of the deepe
          And terrors of the Skies.
Thus, scorning all the cares
          That fate or fortune brings,
His Booke the Heau'ns hee makes,
          His wisedome heav'nly things;
Good thoughts his surest friends,
          His wealth a well-spent age,
The earth his sober Inne,
          And quiet pilgrimage.(1)

The music set for this poem, if translated into the long and short signs of prosody, gives us a series of impossible lines, impossible, that is, from the classical point of view; it is difficult to imagine any Greek or Roman poet writing entirely in a series of tribrachs strung together. The notes are nearly all of exactly the same length, with an occasional lingering on one, followed by a hurried movement on the next. It is, therefore, useless to look to the music for an indication of any of the feet described in the Obseruations.

Yet the music gives no impression of formlessness, and the poem as read has a very clear form. The most conventional prosodists would agree that it was written entirely in an iambic or ‘rising-stress’ metre, according to whether they were using terms derived from classical prosody or names invented to agree as nearly as possible with the accepted theory of English utterance. Now, the music, showing as it does no trace of iambic structure, and the words, which can be satisfyingly read by anyone, actually agree as happily as Campion could have hoped. It follows that he has thrown over all his stated desires to write English poems on classical principles, and on those principles only.

This self-contradiction is underlined by his firm and unmistakable use of rime in the poem. According to his own views, this should mean that the poem is a rickety structure concealed under the fatness of ornament. He would hardly have published it if he himself really agreed with this verdict; certainly, no reader of this and other English verses can agree with the verdict. The poem does hold together; but if we are to find the integrating principle of its structure, we must look elsewhere than in the detailed instructions to versifiers with which he concludes the Obseruations.

4 “NEVER WEATHER-BEATEN SAILE”

(NO. XI IN THE FIRST PART OF TWO BOOKES OF AYRES)

Never weather-beaten Saile more willing bent to shore,
Never tyred Pilgrims limbs affected slumber more,
Than my wearied spright now longs to flye out of my troubled brest.
          O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soule to rest.
Ever-blooming are the ioyes of Heav'ns high paradice,
Cold age deafes not there our eares, nor vapour dims our eyes:
Glory there the Sun outshines, whose beames the blessed only see;
          O come quickly, glorious Lord, and raise my spright to thee.

The music of this poem, again, gives us lines which are apparently metrically impossible. Once more, the notes are for the most part of equal length, and no prosodist can make classical feet out of a collection of tape-measured inches. There is a further difficulty here: the first phrase of the fourth line of each stanza, ‘O come quickly’, is made by the music to occur three times. Campion never published the poem without the music, and therefore, presumably, thought of the verse-form as having always this lengthened last line. Modern editors of the words alone give the phrase only once. In either form the stanza gives the impression of being well-balanced. If it were written on a strict arrangement of classical feet, according to Campion's principles, this change of form would be impossible; the slight necessary change in the order of the feet would break down the form altogether and make it unrecognizable.

Manifestly, the form does not fall apart. Yet an attempt to scan the poem in terms of rising or falling stresses provides almost as many difficulties. The first phrase of the first line, ‘Never weather-beaten Saile’, would at first sight instantly be put down as a group of falling-stress feet; the second half of the line, ‘more willing bent to shore’, would, if treated by itself, be called a collection of rising-stress feet. There is no suggestion in the first half of the line that the poet is deliberately producing an effect of clash between words and ideal pattern. Unless we are to say simply that a syllable has been omitted at the beginning or the end, which is the usual explanation of this kind of line, or that there has been indecision in the creation of the line, we must look for an explanation in different terms. If there were any doubt that the first half of the line coincides instead of clashing with the pattern, it should be necessary only to look at the corresponding line,

Ever-blooming are the ioyes of Heav'ns high paradice,

in the second stanza. It cannot be supposed that this line is intended to give an impression of restlessness and difficulty. In fact, the whole poem is obviously constructed of words chosen to clarify the pattern and not to obscure it. Campion himself gives no description of the pattern we find here.

5 “NOW WINTER NIGHTS”

(NO. XII IN THE THIRD BOOKE OF AYRES)

          Now winter nights enlarge
          The number of their houres;
And clouds their stormes discharge
          Upon the ayrie towres.
Let now the chimneys blaze
                    And cups o'erflow with wine,
Let well-tun'd words amaze
                    With harmonie divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
          Shall waite on hunny Love
While youthfull Revels, Masks, and Courtly sights,
          Sleepes leaden spels remove.
          This time doth well dispence
          With lovers long discourse;
Much speech hath some defence,
          Though beauty no remorse.
All doe not all things well;
                    Some measures comely tread;
Some knotted Ridles tell;
          Some Poems smoothly read.
The Summer hath his ioyes,
                    And Winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toyes,
          They shorten tedious nights.

Once again, we are faced by the fact that the notes lovingly joined to the words of this poem are no help to anyone searching for Campion's practice of Campion's theories. Once again, the notes translated into metrical terms would give a fantastic collocation of tribrachs, divided impossibly at times into half-shorts. Some lines, in fact, will not provide the right number of syllables to be divided into an arrangement of any complete feet. ‘Now winter nights enlarge’, for instance, is given by the music the pattern s s s s s – ; any good Roman would agree that this is ridiculous.

A prosodist adhering to any other system would find some difficulty in deciding where he was to divide the lines, not only internally into feet, but among themselves. The first line of each stanza must run without a pause into the second, and the third into the fourth, unless reason is to be denied. The decided rimes, however, cannot be denied. There is obviously some structural intent in the division of lines. It is an intent appearing clearly in most of the poems, and occasionally bursting its way into the well-mannered ranks of classical rules in the Obseruations.

6 “FOLLOW YOUR SAINT”

(NO. X IN THE FIRST PART OF A BOOKE OF AYRES)

Follow your Saint, follow with accents sweet;
Haste you, sad noates, fall at her flying feete:
There, wrapt in cloud of sorrowe pitie move,
And tell the ravisher of my soule I perish for her love.
But if she scorns my never-ceasing paine,
Then burst with sighing in her sight and nere returne againe.
All that I soong still to her praise did tend,
Still she was first; still she my songs did end.
Yet she my love and Musicke both doth flie,
The Musicke that her Eccho is and beauties simpathie;
Then let my Noates pursue her scornfull flight:
It shall suffice that they were breath'd and dyed for her delight.

By this time it must be obvious that we shall find no undeviating adherence to classical rules in many of the songs, least of all perhaps in this. The music makes no recognized classical metrical shape; rime is made very obvious by the early appearance of the second of each pair of riming words; there is never the slightest need to wrest a syllable from its customary form in the pronunciation of everyday speech. None of the rules of lengthening by position, length from spelling, or arbitrary length or shortness ascribed to any monosyllable, appears to indicate a form not at once apparent. The form is apparent. The most insensitive reader could be dared to do his worst with this poem and a sense of shape would still emerge.

As in the fourth example, the first line may at first sight give an impression of indecision in the choice between rising-stress and falling-stress rhythms. Nobody can read ‘Follow your Saint’ as a phrase in pure rising stress; if he wishes to do so he had better emend to ‘Pursue your Saint’. Nobody, on the other hand, can read ‘with accents sweet’ as a phrase in falling-stress rhythm. Yet the whole line—

Follow your Saint, follow with accents sweet;

fits into its place in the construction of the stanza as a whole, with a sense not only of ease, but of perfection. This is the more remarkable when we find one line at least—

The Musicke that her Eccho is and beauties simpathie;

constructed in perfect rising-stress rhythm from beginning to end. Obviously, Campion has not decided arbitrarily on a novel shape for a single line, and made all other lines agree with the first; the relationship of syllables and lines is something more complex.

Neither classical theory nor music fully explains the structure of these poems. There are in them, however, other elements emphasizing structure.

In ‘Rose-Cheekt Lawra’ and ‘Come, let us sound with melody,’ Campion is attempting to prove that English can be persuaded into providing relationships of length sufficiently strict to form a staple of pattern, and it therefore seems unlikely that any of these extra marks of shape will be used, though they may, of course, appear accidentally from time to time. Rime certainly is rigorously excluded, as might be expected from the fierce denunciation of this figura verbi in the Obseruations. Echoes and repetitions of vowel and consonant sounds, on the other hand, occur so frequently in both poems that they begin to enforce an examination of the reasons for their presence; and that examination soon shows that sounds of a similar nature are always closely grouped.

In ‘Rose-Cheekt Lawra,’ the first stanza has four words—‘sing’, ‘smoothly’, ‘silent’ and ‘sweetely’—beginning with the latter ‘s’. The same sound, or a sound closely related to it, occurs internally in the words ‘rose’, ‘musick’ and ‘gracing’, while ‘beawties’ ends with a sound belonging to the same group. Next in frequency to these come the liquids and nasals, in ‘rose’, ‘Lawra’, ‘come’, ‘sing’, smoothly’, ‘silent’, ‘musick’, ‘sweetely’ and ‘gracing’. The next stanza employs this last group more obviously, only the words ‘do’, ‘is’ (which occurs twice), ‘thy’ and ‘birth’ showing no examples; in this stanza, too, the related sounds ‘d’ and ‘t’ put in an appearance, occurring six times. In the third stanza, they come to the fore with nine appearances, while the background is quietly filled in by the unobtrusive work of the sibilants, liquids and nasals that have been more evident in the earlier stanzas. Finally, the fourth stanza rests upon all these sounds together, ‘s’ having six entries, ‘d’ and ‘t’ six, and ‘l’, ‘m’ and ‘n’ fourteen between them. In these four lines, moreover, the hard ‘k’ sound, which has come six times into the first twelve lines, is suddenly emphasized by being used twice in the adjacent words ‘like’ and ‘cleare’.

The arrangement of vowels, though not so obvious, is quite as interesting as the grouping of consonants. Vowels related, by pronunciation as well as spelling, appear in ‘come’, ‘smoothly’, ‘beawties’, ‘musick’ and ‘other’, while ‘ee’ occurs in both ‘cheekt’ and ‘sweetely’, in the course of the first stanza. Stanza two has the same sounds, though less frequently, and a new one in ‘concent’, ‘heav'n’ and ‘heavenly’. The third stanza adds to these an emphasized use of the sound which has appeared in ‘Lawra’ and ‘formes’ by repeating the word ‘discord’. Both the ‘o’ and the ‘e’ groups are used impartially in the last stanza.

‘Come, let us sound with melody’ moves straight into a bold collection of hard consonant-sounds in ‘come’, ‘kings’, ‘king’ and ‘creator’, supporting them with frequent ‘s’s, ‘l’s and ‘m’s or ‘n’s. Stanza two abandons the ‘k’ sound in favour of ‘p’ in ‘perpetually’ and ‘power’, and ‘th’ in ‘throne’, ‘thence’, ‘thunders’ and ‘Father’, with an undercurrent similar to that in the first stanza. In the next stanza this undercurrent comes to the surface, in every word except ‘O’ (twice), ‘yet’, ‘that’, while ‘k’ and ‘p’ are present, though subdued, in ‘sacred’, ‘spite’, ‘canst’, ‘penetrate’ and ‘Spirit’. The following stanza has the same sounds with the addition of ‘th’ and ‘v’ or ‘f’ in ‘earthly’, ‘three’, ‘that’, ‘thirsts’, ‘lively’, ‘Fountaine’ and ‘devineness’. The fifth stanza uses all the sounds that have yet appeared without any apparent preference, while stanza six disregards ‘p’, and has ‘k’ only twice, sunk in the middle of the words ‘darkness’ and ‘record’.

The vowels grouped in stanza one are the rounded ‘oo’, ‘u’ and ‘o’ sounds in ‘come’, ‘us’, ‘omnipotent’, ‘author’, ‘of’, ‘number’, ‘all’, ‘world’ and ‘harmonie’, while the second and fourth lines both end in words containing the same sound, ‘creator’ and ‘framed’. Their placing in this position creates something like the shadow of a rime, and the shadow is deepened by the use of the same trick in all but the last two stanzas, stanza two having ‘thunders’ and ‘Sonne’ in the corresponding places, stanza three ‘things’ and ‘Spirit’, and stanza four ‘objects’ and ‘devinenes’; these last two words have the syllable containing ‘e’ long, according to its place in the quantitative pattern indicated by the music. Stanza two even repeats the effect by closing the first and third lines in ‘shining’ and ‘abiding’; stanza three uses this sound again in ‘sprite’ and ‘revive’, and adds the group in ‘invisible’, ‘unlimited’, ‘things’, ‘in’ and ‘Spirit’; stanza four has chiefly the sound of its semi-rime (‘-iects’, ‘-nes’), in ‘rescue’ (twice), ‘darknes’, ‘hence’, ‘elementall’, ‘obiects’ and ‘devinenes’; the fifth stanza, though keeping this sound, returns to a fuller use of rounded vowels in ‘soule’, ‘O’, ‘God’, ‘bespotted’, ‘altered’, ‘so’, ‘purenes’, ‘cannot’, ‘acknowledge’, ‘O’, ‘Father’; while the characteristic trick of the last stanza is to repeat any one sound very soon after its first appearance in the stanza, line one having ‘do’ and ‘remove’ next to each other, line two ‘I'le’ and ‘shine’ next to each other, with ‘light’ at the end of the line, and line three picking up, from ‘forth’ in line two, the sound repeated in ‘record’ and ‘more’, with only a single intervening syllable.

Now, whether or not Campion's choice of all these linked sounds drawing out a pattern was deliberate, the fact remains that the linking of both vowels and consonants in these two poems is so close and complex that it compels the ear to sense some connection other than semantic between the parts of a group and between the groups themselves. The succession of vowels and the succession of consonants almost give the impression of two melodic lines in the older music going their independent but companionable ways, and between them supporting and emphasizing, after the fashion of the old music, the rational meaning of the words. In any case, the arrangement of actual sound in these poems makes it quite impossible for the verse to fall apart. ‘Rose-Cheekt Lawra’ has always had its beauty admitted; and ‘Come, let us sound with melody,’ though in official disgrace in both Bullen's and Vivian's editions of Campion, seems to me to have a beauty both rich and delicately subtle when it is read aloud with a due care for the intricate weaving of the two threads of vowels and consonants. It is not, after all, very difficult to notice and perhaps slightly emphasize sounds which the poet thought important enough to repeat; and the slight effort has in this case the tremendous reward of an increased facility in ascribing to difficult syllables their right length, for words like ‘of’ and ‘with’ and ‘thy’, by joining more obviously important words in their scheme of sound, emerge quite naturally to take their position as ‘long’ syllables where the pattern requires it. The possibility begins to arise that these figurœ verbi, as Campion himself would almost certainly have called them, have some structural function in the verse.

Now the figure most evident in the other four poems is, of course, rime. Number three in the six poems examined has a simple abcb scheme, number four has aabb, number five has ababcdcdefef and number six aabbcc. All these schemes are quite unmistakable; it is impossible to suppose that at the moment of writing these songs Campion was in the least ashamed of rime or had any desire to conceal it. ‘The man of life upright,’ indeed, positively hammers its rimes, either by repeating a part of the rimesound at the end of one of the strictly unrimed lines, as in stanza one, where ‘deedes’ occurs between ‘free’ and ‘(vani)tee’, or by giving these lines a half-rime, as in stanza three, where lines one and three end in ‘towres’ and ‘shrowd’ respectively. In ‘Never weather-beaten Saile’ the rimes are made to stand out with almost startling clarity in the first two lines through the two facts that the rime-words are literally the only possible points of repose in restless lines of thirteen syllables each, and that the rime is on a sound ‘-ore’, completely different in character from the thin ‘e’s and ‘i’s of the rest of the words in the lines. This introduction to the scheme makes the ear unconsciously expectant of the rimes which are to come, and ready to pick them out in high relief. A different method makes the rimes equally obvious in ‘Now winter nights enlarge,’ where they thrust their heads into some positions where nobody would expect a point of rest. It is natural to say ‘Now winter nights enlarge the number of their houres’ and ‘And clouds their stormes discharge upon the ayrie towres’ as phrases with hardly a pause; yet the insistent ‘enlarge-discharge’ chime makes some division inevitable. The refusal to provide a rime for ‘lights’ in the first stanza and ‘ioyes’ in the second until the expected interval has been increased by nearly half as much again makes a continuous run of the voice equally inevitable for the lines ‘While youthful Revels, Masks, and Courtly sights’ and ‘Though love and all his pleasures are but toyes’. After the boldness and occasional shock of some of these uses of rime, it is impossible to find anything but a natural use of speech in the practice in ‘Follow your Saint’; it is sufficient to say that the rimes are neither obtrusive nor hesitant, but occur with the quiet confidence of perfect art.

Rime, however, though far the most important, is not the only device of sound used even in these poems. It is noticeable that each stanza of number three tends to use a clearly defined vowel-group of its own: ‘e’s and ‘i’s in the first stanza, ‘o’s and ‘a’s in the second, ‘e’s or ‘i’s and ‘ow’ in the third, ‘e’s and ‘o’s in the fourth, full round ‘o’s in the fifth, and in the sixth a mingling of nearly all the vowels of the preceding stanzas. Moreover, alliteration, repeated words and strong echoes like ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ occur within each stanza. This last device occurs at the beginning of number four, where ‘never’ and ‘weather’ stand side by side. There is also unobtrusive alliteration on ‘beaten’ and ‘bent’ in line one, ‘deafes’ and ‘dims’ in line six, and a more obvious use in the placing of ‘beames’ and ‘blessed’ with only ‘the’ intervening in line seven. The two stanzas of ‘Now winter nights enlarge’ are differentiated from each other by the avoidance until the end of the first of hard consonants likely to create even a short pause, and the early and frequent employment in the second of ‘p’, ‘t’ and ‘k’ sounds. This, and all other devices, are, like rime, less obvious in ‘Follow your Saint’ than in any of the other poems; it can be remarked, however, that the whole poem tends to move on swift sibilants and liquids, pausing only in the middle of stanza two with the combined weight of ‘k’, ‘p’ and ‘t’.

Now it is obvious that the devices of repetition and echo in speech sounds can be used never for dividing, but always for connecting, the parts of verse. An extensive use of these devices must indicate a desire on the part of the poet to emphasize the larger units of his form rather than the small elements which are grouped to make those units. This, surely, is what Campion is doing throughout his poetry. Whether he does it deliberately or unconsciously it is impossible to determine. The use of the devices is so sure and sensitive that it seems to argue a deliberate craftsmanship, specially from a poet so scrupulous and so determined as he in maintaining the principle, unwelcome to many would-be artists, that artistic creation involves training and effort. On the other hand, those remarks in the Obseruations which suggest this very attitude, of looking for large organized units, appear to be the spontaneous utterance of impulse, and are different in tone from the careful reports of his conscious reflections on the structure of individual feet. In any case, these unreasoned remarks have proved more permanently interesting than the theories which the essay formally sets out to prove; and the elements of his practice which seem to bear the closest relationship to those remarks promise to be more fruitful than the painstaking performance of his imagined duties as a poet.

In ‘Rose-Cheekt Lawra,’ for instance, the trochees demanded by his stated ideal pattern are contrived out of English material with remarkable ingenuity, and a very brief inspection will reveal them. Each one stands by itself in something like the ideal shape of a long syllable followed by a syllable half the length of the first. Yet when we compare one of these feet with another, it is sometimes difficult to find a real correspondence between them: ‘smoothly’ does not seem to have quite the same shape as ‘either’; even more obvious is the discrepancy between ‘either’ and ‘other’, which stand side by side in the first stanza and are supposed to represent exactly the same foot. Surely ‘smoothly’ occupies in utterance a greater length of time than ‘either’, and ‘either’ than ‘other’. Yet no whole line gives the impression of being out of balance with other lines, still less any whole stanza with other stanzas. In fact, it is almost impossible to feel certain that a stable unit has been found until a stanza has been completed. This sounds dangerous: if the correspondence between feet is really erratic, it seems unsafe to depend on the organization of those feet into a larger whole to secure a sense of form. But in this, perhaps the most surely and exquisitely satisfying of Campion's attempts at classical metres, he has been very much wiser than his critics. Bullen and Saintsbury, for instance, admitting the poem's beauty, sigh, ‘But how much more beautiful would it have been with rime’!

Now rime would have exercised precisely the wrong function here: it would have suggested a division into strictly proportionate pairs of lines, whereas Campion needs, and secures, an irresistible run-on from beginning to end of at least the first stanza, which must indicate the form. If there were any doubt about this, it would be set at rest by a glance at the deliberate use of a single word to connect the last two lines of the poem. Having secured this movement, Campion proceeds to control it by that use of connecting sounds, varied from stanza to stanza, which has already appeared. The result is never rigid, always sure; for in the end the unit certainly is one of quantity, but it is a quantitas discreta into so many and such variable parts, through lines which differ slightly among themselves, to feet which preserve recognizable shapes together with incalculable proportions, that the effect is one of safety quite unmixed with boredom. The length of the stanza as a whole is dependable.

The same principle holds good throughout ‘Come, let us sound with melody,’ and here perhaps it is even more interesting to watch. The acid comments which have been made about this poem, and about its music in the article by Janet Dodge ‘On Campion's Music’, in the introduction to Bullen's edition of Campion's Works, suggest that it is some enormity. A generation which has seen the return of music, since the time of Miss Dodge's article, to some of the methods of free barring used by Campion and his contemporaries probably has an advantage in the ability to see that the lack of four-square rhythm in this song certainly does not rob it of form; the phrases which accompany each line of the verse are balanced mathematically and there can be no doubts as to their outline. In fact, it is much easier to see and understand than the outline of the words; for Campion, relying no doubt on the fact that the music will always be able to settle disputes, has allowed himself a greater dependence on arbitrary rules of length in his syllables. According to the music, this poem is stricter than ‘Rose-Cheekt Lawra.’ According to the natural utterance of speech, it is much less strict. Yet words and music are in a comfortable alliance, and the fact that moderately careful reading can make the words alone sound shapely is due once more to instinctive trust in the principle of making sure of the length of the line, which is itself stable in this poem, each long line corresponding to any other long and each short to any other short, and allowing the feet to vary among themselves. Once more the shape is held together by unobtrusive linking of letters; and if the voice is led by the prepared importance of certain sounds to linger over some syllables more than in normal speech, the effect is the very suitable one of imparting a kind of impassioned gravity to the whole poem.

Now these principles, though probably a sound basis for the treatment of quantity in English, are certainly far removed from the true principles of classical prosody, and it is as well to remember, in reading Campion's supposed examples of classical metres, that they are certainly examples of very subtle quantitative verse, and therefore require a slightly different approach from that required by the commoner English measures, but that the ordinary approach to Latin verse is equally useless. With the poems which frankly jettison most of the classical rules, there is, of course, no temptation to use this approach, but it is still sometimes necessary to be prepared for slight variations from straightforward stressed measures.

In ‘The man of life upright’ the necessity for open-minded alertness is, perhaps, not very evident. Campion is quite simply using stresses to mark out a regular beat compatible with the mood of steady decision pervading the whole poem. He never deviates from rising-stress rhythm, but it is worth observing from the evidence of his accompanying music that he did not in this case intend stress to induce length, for the notes are all, with a very few exceptions, of the same length. It is certain, too, that he was not attempting to produce the foot that some prosodists apparently regard as possible, an ‘iamb’ with stress substituted for length, for the music gives at the beginning of each line a rest equivalent to the note used as the normal unit for each syllable, while the last syllable of each line is given a note lasting for two of these units; this makes hay of an attempt to scan on any ‘iambic’ basis, however licentiate. In fact, the prosodist is left in his usual precarious position of having to decide for himself where he is to divide one foot from the next. If he chooses the better part of valour, he will probably accept no divisions except those indicated through rimes by the poet himself. This particular poem may seem temptingly easy to deal with when it offers a disarming regularity of stress, but the fact that its author gave eight musical units to each line of six syllables should be an indication that he neither worked nor desired to work on the idea of a strict mathematical value for each syllable.

Such an idea would be impossible for the next poem. ‘Never weather-beaten Saile’ asks for, and is given by the music, a lingering on the last syllable of the first two and the last lines of each stanza; it is absolutely essential that these rather long and unpausing lines should have a decided rest on the rime-word. The third line of each stanza, which has two more syllables than the other lines, is allowed only the same aggregate in notes, and it will be found that in reading, the voice, hurrying to the resolution of the last line, actually allows this line no more time than the others. If the last line is read as it is usually now printed, it is exactly commensurate with the others. The music, by repeating ‘O come quickly’ twice, makes it half as long again. In either case, all the lines are in a remarkably simple ratio to each other. The syllables, on the contrary, fluctuate considerably; the phrase, ‘more willing bent to shore’, for instance, seems to demand at least four different syllable-lengths, for ‘more’, ‘will-’ and ‘bent’, ‘-ing’ and ‘to’ and ‘shore’. Stress changes from falling to rising in so many lines that the change can hardly be considered as variations on a pattern based on one stress-order. In fact, the only calculable unit is the line.

The next poem seems at first sight to demand a grouping of lines for its unit, for the music prefixes to some of them a rest which brings the first of several pairs of lines into the curious relationship with the second of seven and a half units to six and a half. This seems absurd to the Euclidean mind, but the phenomenon occurs so often that the ear becomes accustomed to it, and appreciates the delicate variety lent by this refusal to march with plantigrade steps. It learns, too, to move with an absolute trust in the placing of the rimes, which occur, as always in Campion's poetry, at intervals exactly calculated to give an effect of balance without solidity. The lines are short but, as they rime alternately and not in couplets, the effect is not that of the battering-ram. It is the dependable use of rime throughout ten lines bearing a repeated proportion to each other that makes the eleventh line, which is nearly twice as long as any of the others, run on its way without an awkward break at the point where the other lines end.

If all these poems show how securely a sensitive poet can move in the dangerous freedom of large units, ‘Follow your Saint’ makes this freedom seem the only possible condition for poetry. Only one line in the whole poem has a regular rising-stress movement from beginning to end, and the way is so subtly prepared for this movement that it comes with that sense of combined freshness and inevitability that has sometimes been described as the essence of poetry. The first three lines of each stanza end with a rising-stress movement definite enough to give a suggestion of flight by the metre and pursuit by the words to the earlier part of the lines, though it would be rash to put forward the theory that the whole line is based on that movement. There must be a pause on ‘Saint’, ‘noates’, ‘soong’ and ‘first’ that will involve hurrying elsewhere, and so rule out the possibility of a regular, stress-marked arrangement of feet. Obviously, it is the stable proportion of lines, varying only between ten and fourteen syllables and indicated by rimes, that must provide the unit. But the persistent scrupulous use of this unit gives Campion the right suddenly to shape a line on a more definitely modelled pattern and so introduce a sense, not of the banal, but of the perfection of freshness. The exquisite coincidence of material and ideal pattern in the line ‘The Musicke that her Eccho is and beauties simpathie’ might occur in the midst of a series of lines on a regular foot-basis and lose half its breath-catching loveliness. Coming as it does among minutely fluctuating but highly organized groups of feet, it is perfect.

Even a casual glance at the matter of Campion's poetry will reveal characteristics of subject and imagery that themselves illumine the effect on some Elizabethan poetry of preoccupation with the means of establishing metrical form. Any reader of Campion's poetry will find that all Campion's subjects are neatly listed for him in the index of every other anthology of Elizabethan poetry. For it is evident that he—like Shakespeare—had no shyness or hesitation in drawing from the common poets' storehouse. The first complete book of English songs published by himself bears on the title-page his own division into ‘Divine and Morall Songs’ and ‘Light Conceits of Lovers’, and that is as good a classification as any of Elizabethan subjects. Campion's religious songs are all characterized by a quite simple reverence that may sometimes appear naïve, as in ‘Tune thy Musicke to thy hart’; but that reverence embraces complexities of religious experience that, perhaps more than anything else in his poetry, remind us of the fact that he lived through twenty years of the seventeenth century. Sometimes he reveals a personal vision of heaven with a luminous clarity that looks forward to Vaughan.

Ever-blooming are the ioys of Heav'ns high paradice,
Cold age deafes not there our eares, nor vapour dims
                                                                                                                                                      our eyes;

and that Heaven evidently marches with the ‘country far beyond the stars’. Sometimes Campion sees himself in personal relationship with God:

View mee, Lord, a worke of thine:
          Shall I then lye drown'd in night?

and then he seems to ‘surfet On the poysoned baytes of sinne’ with Donne. And then he can forget them, with Herbert, to—

          Rise now and walke the waies of light;
'Tis not too late yet to begin.

Always, whether he is writing a version of one of the Psalms or crystallizing his own view of the world as—

                                                  thou masse of meere confusion,
          False light, with many shadowes dimm'd,
          Old Witch, with new foyles trimm'd,
Thou deadly sleepe of soule, and charm'd illusion,

there is something describable only as tone, which declares that he means what he says.

In ‘Light Conceits of Lovers’ we should hardly expect him always to mean what he says. With very few exceptions, as in ‘When the God of merrie love,’ the lightness of his love-poems is always enchantingly delicate, amused and amusing. He can play the devout lover with just sufficient solemnity to be suspect, swearing with lying hand on heart that his pallor comes—

                              not with poring on my booke:
My Mistris cheeke, my bloud hath tooke,
For her mine owne hath me forsooke.

He can admit placidly that—

Though Love and all his pleasures are but toyes,
          They shorten tedious nights,

and assign them to their proper place in the gay list of ‘harmonie divine, yellow waxen lights, youthfull revels, Masks, and Courtly sights’ that ‘give Winter his delights’. He will recognize and simultaneously pity the folly of love-lorn man or woman—and then turn in his tracks to confound us with the delicate sincerity of ‘And would you see my Mistris face or Followe thy faire sunne.’ For his love is not always light or, in any sense, conceited, and he is capable of sounding with implacable sureness the deep note whose grave harmonies affect the whole key of that perfect lyric, ‘When thou must home to shades of under ground.’

In all these the balance of occasion and feeling, import and response, is preserved with finished poetic tact. Campion was sensitive enough to reflect nearly all the sides of Elizabethan alertness to the multitudinous delights of earth and the happiness of heaven, the pains of life and the darkness of death—and he reflected nothing else. It is useless to search him for aliquid novi, and there is no need to do so.

Yet there is a newness about the forms which many of his reflections take. His Corinnas and Lesbias and Bessies may be related to the Delias and Chloes and sweet Kates, but they have their individuality, and it arises partly from the fact that Campion draws attention to qualities in them hardly noticed by other poets. They may have golden wires for hair and pearls for teeth, but he is not particularly interested if they have. Yet if they move or speak or sing, his awareness quickens at once. Poem after poem reveals an almost total disregard for visual imagery in its usual forms. Colour, for instance, except in the dubious form of black, appears less than half a dozen times in all the songs, and when the mention of it is as general as ‘thy red and white’, it argues a decided lack of interest. Colour in itself seems to him too static to be stimulating, and he evidently passed the same disapproving verdict on unchanging shapes: his ‘lovely formes do flowe’.

One of the few places where he presents a picture beautiful in its very freedom from change is in the description of ‘heav'ns high paradice’, and at that point, obviously, he has turned his back on his interests in the world; the beauties of heaven are ipso facto unsuitable for the earth. So when he descends from the rarefied atmosphere of Paradise he looks instantly and instinctively for something either in movement or capable of it. Darkness and light are so much relative terms that each implies the possibility of changing into the other, and he varies the lighting of his poems with sun and shadow, day and night and, occasionally, life and death. Natural description appears only through the varying forms of the seasons, when the ‘peacefull westerne winde’ tames the winter storms only to let the delights of winter replace the joys of summer; or in flowing sea and river; or in the lightly poised shapes of eagle or dove. Everything, in fact, is at the point of that ‘sweete delicious morne’ in his ‘Mistris’ face, ‘Where day is breeding, never borne’. Love dies or flames like a fire. Human beings hardly seem alive to him until they begin to move or speak or sing. His saints and his wantons alike must be flying, his suns must flee their shadow, his ladies moving swiftly and lightly from raging to kindness.

Awake, thou spring of speaking grace, mute rest becomes not thee;
The fayrest women, while they sleepe, and Pictures, equall bee.

Naturally, then, he delights to think of anything which seems in itself the essence of movement. Winds blow through his fields and gardens, and the abstract word ‘flight’ occurs over and over again. Above all, he loves and praises and calls upon music in all he does, music which cannot exist without movement. ‘Heav'n is Musick’, ‘To Musicke bent’ is his mind, the beloved's voice ‘is an Eccho cleare which Musicke doth beget’, she has a ‘smoothe toong whose musicke hell can move’, God—

hath all the world in
                              Harmonie framed.

Music sounds through his poetry as it probably sounded through all his existence; the reader cannot escape it if he would. It is significant that when he wishes to suggest, in ‘The man of life upright,’ the complete absence of bustle and hurry with their possible attendant distresses, he speaks, not of ‘quiet’ days, which ninety-nine poets out of a hundred would have said, simply because the general term ‘quiet’ seems more inclusive than any other; but of ‘silent’ days, as though he could not make the idea immediate to his imagination unless he reached it through his hearing. It has exactly the same awakening effect on the mind as the use of the word ‘crocus’, by any other poet, instead of the more general ‘yellow’.

Here is a poet in whom the sense through which the majority of men and women receive their clearest impressions is, by comparison with other senses, dormant. Campion simply is not interested in keeping his eye on the object; if he must use his eyes, he prefers to have to search, and follow movement. He likes the feel of air. But above all he loves the sound of things. His aural imagination is developed so much more fully than other perceptions in him, or than hearing in other poets, that it sometimes seems a will-o'-the-wisp fancy that he has consented to live anywhere but in the world of pure sound. But the poems are here as evidence of his wider human sympathies, and they are a sufficient proof of the rare rewards of that aural sensitiveness. Again, it seems impossible that anyone who disregards the sense of sight, the most generally and highly developed of the human senses, should succeed in conveying any of his auditory experiences. He is handicapped from the beginning by the fact that the technical terms of music are unfamiliar to most readers: either he must give up the idea of exact description, or he must create a musical-poetic diction of his own. Campion never seems to feel the need of technicalities; he does not go even as far as Jonson, who writes, ‘Woe weeps out her division when she sings’. Campion is content with the general word ‘music’ and the occasional use of ‘melody’ and ‘harmony’. He makes no attempt to translate his experience through analogies from other activities. There seems no solution to his problem of communication.

There is a solution, and it is the same as the answer to the earlier question. The study of Campion's versification is important, because without it a sharing of his experience is impossible. To examine subject alone leaves us with no means of distinguishing him from Anon.; to examine imagery alone is to find ourselves abandoned on an interesting road without a signpost. His matter as a whole remains meaningless until it has been defined and clarified by the sympathetic moulding of verbal form.

The six examples chosen from his poems, differing so widely as they do among themselves, do not nearly exhaust the variety of his metrical forms. It never seemed to occur to him that it was possible to write many songs in exactly the same measure. He knew instinctively that form affects mood; in the Obseruations he is obviously interested in the emotional effect of different forms of verse. But he never attempted to depend on the usually accepted effects of single feet; that left no room for subtlety. Always his ear was alert for the balance of groups, just as the ear of the musicians of the day was listening for balanced phrasing. The effort to relate one note or one syllable rigidly to the rest has been for the moment abandoned, and the result in the music and poetry of this period is an impression of directness and, deceptively, simplicity. The sureness of handling in those larger groups, a sureness setting the hearer's mind at rest and satisfying his rhythmical sense, gave room within the groups for a flexibility of utterance, for shifts of stress and complex syncopation, for resting and hurrying, for flying almost silently through the air-like movement of the ‘f’s and ‘l’s and ‘s’s of a poem like ‘Follow your Saint,’ till something very like the complete re-creation of the artist's experience has been achieved. Campion's verse gives us a sense of sharing the completed mood of his poetic experience that no description could have conveyed, and it is the essence of a poem that its form should work on the emotions through the ear till it awakens the exact mood fitted for the reception of its matter.

Perhaps the hints given to us by Campion's practice will now enable us better to understand the poetry of his contemporaries.

Note

1. This song occurs also as No. XVIII in the First Part of A Booke of Ayres, 1601. There is another printed version of it in Alison's An Houres Recreation in Musick, 1606, and manuscript versions in Sloane MS. 4218; Harl. MS. 4064; MS. 17 B.L.; Rawl. MS. Poet. 31; Chetham MS. 8012.

   MSS. Sloane and B.L. state that the verses are by Fra. Bacon.

   Harl. MS. omits Stanza 4 and not, as Percival Vivian says, Stanza 5. Its variants are: line 2, life for minde; line 6, ioy for ioyes; line 9, tower for towres; line 17, But scorning all the chaunce: Vivian gives this line's variants for line 21.

   Variants in Sloane MS. are: line 17, care for cares; line 22, life for wealth.

   MS. B.L. has: line 8, fortune for sorrowes; line 17, care for cares; line 22, life for wealth.