The Poetry
[In the essay that follows, Lindley examines Campion's poetry in English, focusing on his love poetry.]
‘The Apothecaries have Bookes of Gold, whose leaves being opened are so light as that they are subject to be shaken with the least breath, yet, rightly handled, they serve both for ornament and use; such are light Ayres.’
(p. 168)
Campion's prefatory remarks to The Fourth Booke of Ayres make an apt initiation of the discussion of his poetry. Apt in that they present quite clearly the crucial problems for any critic or reader who tries to articulate his delight in these lyrics.
The first difficulty arises from the avowed ‘lightness’ of Campion's poems. For many years established literary criticism held ambiguity, density and complexity to be necessary qualities for elevation to the literary pantheon, requiring at the same time seriousness of moral engagement and, preferably, some clear signs of rebellious originality. Faced with Campion the alternatives, in this climate, are three: to ignore him (as Douglas Peterson does); to accept the fundamental lightness of the poetry but to divert attention to the skill of his versification (as does Hallett Smith); or else to recuperate him by locating his excellence in the pregnant plainness of part of his output (as Yvor Winters argues, and, to a certain extent, Walter Davis after him).1
The existence of this book is self-evidently a denial of the first alternative, but Campion's remarks also prompt a challenge to the other approaches. For though his technical skill is a vital ingredient in his claim upon a reader's attention, he yet suggests that airs have a useful function as well as an ornamental one. This variation on the standard Renaissance justification of all literature must be taken to indicate that the matter of his collections as well as their manner was significant to him, and should be to the reader.
While Winters and Davis do accept that Campion's meaning is of importance, their praise is bought at some cost. In Davis's Introduction a developmental history of Campion's career is generated, and all that is most worthy is found at the end, in The Third Booke of Ayres. Not only is his view based on a rather dubious chronology,2 but it rests for its persuasiveness on an assumption that the ‘ornamental’ (or ‘light’ in Davis's terminology) is necessarily inferior to the ‘plain’ (or ‘solid’). This valorisation runs counter to the implication of Campion's statement. He does not distinguish one category from the other; both ornament and use inhere in the aery thinness of the lyrics, provided that they are ‘rightly handled’.
This qualification is, of course, the key element in Campion's claim, and chief source of critical difficulty. At its simplest it poses a problem of decorum for the critic. The image of gold leaf suggests that delicacy is required in handling the poems, a delicacy that some might feel is contravened when John T. Irwin or Stephen Ratcliffe3 unleash the full weight of their critical armoury on the single lyric ‘Now winter nights enlarge’.
The question of ‘right handling’ goes, however, deeper than this. At the end of his address to the reader Campion, following Martial, asserts:
To be brief, all these Songs are mine if you expresse them well, otherwise they are your owne.
This comment directs our attention back to an ambiguity in the opening image. For one can either take the books of gold as standing for the books of airs and the apothecaries for the audience who must handle with care, or else the apothecary figures the poet carefully treating his golden material to produce ornamental and useful ware. Both possibilities are clearly present as Campion expresses the dual responsibility of author and reader in constructing and construing his poetry.
The aim of this chapter is to take up these implications as they affect the reader and describe the management of the poems themselves. There will be no attempt to construct a picture of the poet apart from the text, or to try, as Davis does, to validate a view of the poetry's worth by creating a teleological model of the poet's ‘development’.
I
It is appropriate first to consider how a reader might approach Campion's Works as a whole. Since they were published in separate books it is useful to enquire whether the individual collections have any integrity, and whether the ordering of the lyrics within each book has any part to play in the generation of significance.
In one collection it is self-evident that the sequence of the lyrics is significant. The Songs of Mourning, published in 1613 with music by Coprario as part of the flood of poetry engendered by the death of Prince Henry, contains a prefatory poem (in Latin) addressed to Frederick, Count Palatine; ‘An Elegie’ on Prince Henry; and seven lyrics addressed in turn to King James, Queen Anne, Prince Charles, Princess Elizabeth, Frederick, Great Britain and The World.
‘An Elegie’ is structured according to the conventions of the classical elegy,4 offering praise of the departed and lamentation at the harshness of Fate, with consolation coming at the end of the poem. The lyrics which follow it are not rigorously tied to the elegiac form, but develop and amplify topics of grief and of consolation in ways determined by the character and social position of each addressee.
The composition of seven lyrics might have been suggested in part by the conventional association of the number seven with mutability and change,5 but the external control on their sequence is most obviously a principle of hierarchical decorum. They begin with a poem addressed to the King, move down the order of precedence of the Royal family, admit nobles and commons in the sixth lyric, and everyone else in the last.
The poetic success of this collection derives from an interplay between conventional constraints on subject matter on the one hand, and on the other the need to shape each lyric in a fashion appropriate to the figure to whom it is addressed. As poem follows poem the reader becomes aware of a delicate and purposeful manipulation of the poet's stance. The first two poems, to the King and Queen, are marked by formal language, a high incidence of apostrophe, and a decorous distance maintained between the poet and the addressee. The poems speak about the King and Queen, not directly to them. In the first, a stanza meditating on the diverse shapes of grief is followed by an apostrophe to Fate:
O Fate, why shouldst thou take from KINGS their joy and treasure?
Their Image if men should deface,
'Twere death; which thou dost race
Even at thy pleasure.
(p. 120)
Sympathy for the King's plight is indirect, and the reader is invited only to wonder from a distance at the tragedy of Prince Henry's death.
In rather similar vein, the second lyric creates a role for the Queen as ‘mother’:
'Tis now dead night, and not a light on earth
Or starre in heaven doth shine:
Let now a mother mourne the noblest birth
That ever was both mortall and divine.
(p. 121)
As it continues with heaped-up apostrophe, the reader's sense of the Queen's grief is not immediate. Her feelings are heroic, and promote only respectful compassion.
The next poem, to Prince Charles, takes advantage of his tenderer years and lesser dignity to speak directly to him, and to offer good advice:
Follow, O follow yet thy Brothers fame,
But not his fate: lets onely change the name,
And finde his worth presented
In thee, by him prevented.
(p. 122)
This marks the first appearance in the lyrics of the chief topic of consolation offered in ‘An Elegie’—the conventional hope fixed on those who live after the Prince's death. The standard topic is revivified here by the personal address of the lyric. In the first stanza Charles's feeling for his brother is characterised:
What can to kinde youth more despightfull prove
Then to be rob'd of one sole Brother?
Father and Mother
Aske reverence, a Brother onely love.
The tone is a development from the previous lyric, less detached, but still couched in a generalised sententiousness that preserves the poet's proper distance from the heir to the throne.
The poem to Princess Elizabeth which follows takes up the presentation of a loving relationship, but, by further dismantling the distance between poet and addressee, allows for the first time a sense of the poet speaking as grieving individual, rather than public spokesman, to emerge. It is perhaps the finest lyric in the set, and deserves to be quoted in full:
So parted you as if the world for ever
Had lost with him her light:
Now could your teares hard flint to truth excite,
Yet may you never
Your loves againe partake in humane sight:
O why should love such two kinde harts dissever
As nature never knit more faire or firme together?
So loved you as sister should a brother,
Not in a common straine,
For Princely blood doeth vulgar fire disdaine:
But you each other
On earth embrac't in a celestiall chaine.
Alasse for love, that heav'nly borne affection
To change should subject be, and suffer earths infection.
(p. 123)
Part of the force of this poem derives from exquisite control of the relationship between rhythm, rhyme structure and sense units, especially in the manipulation of feminine line-endings. … But major constituents in this lyric's success are the delicacy of its address to the Princess, and the power its simplicity derives from the context of the poem in the sequence.
Where, in the third lyric, Prince Charles had been addressed in a formal ‘thou’, the increased intimacy of this poem is signalled by its use of the ‘you’ form. At the same time the opening lines dramatise the Princess's grief by their suggestion that the poet is an eye-witness of her sorrow, speaking from first-hand knowledge of the nature of her parting from her brother.
The creation for the poet of a posture involving him as sympathetic spectator gives a tenderness to the fourth and fifth lines, as tentative consolation is offered in a context of marvelling at such passionate sorrow. The apostrophe with which the stanza concludes then becomes a personal response to the plight of the Princess.
The warmth of the first stanza owes much to its hinting at the vocabulary and style of love-lyric. These hints are taken up in the second stanza, to be qualified and converted into praise of the Prince and his sister, before the poet delivers his final verdict, integrating this poem into the sequence of meditations on cruel fate.
This is not only a fine poem in its own right, but it also occupies a central place in the sequence in more than a simply numerical sense. The decorum required of the poet in his address to royal personages here permits him to approach most nearly to the poem's addressee, and, in so doing, to suggest fully his own sorrow at the death of the Prince. After this fourth poem, the poet gradually moves back to a position of detachment, making possible different perspectives upon the Prince's death.
Frederick, Elector Palatine, the addressee of the fifth poem, was betrothed to Elizabeth, but had only met Prince Henry some three weeks before his death. It is therefore appropriate that the tone of grief, dominant in the lyrics to immediate family, should be much more subdued, and the poetry should look to a positive future:
Such the condition is of humane life,
Care must with pleasure mixe, and peace with strife:
Thoughts with the dayes must change; as tapers waste
So must our griefes; day breakes when night is past.
(p. 124)
Formally the last two poems, since they are not directed to individuals, act as a kind of concluding couplet, recapitulating and generalising the matter presented in the first five poems. So the ample mourning of Great Britain is narrated, testifying to universal regard for the Prince. Perhaps the rather flat tone of this poem is apt enough after the more personal lyrics which precede it, but that does not really save it from being the weakest of the set.
The last poem completes the sequence both in its further movement away from the poet's deepest involvement expressed in the fourth poem, and also by rounding out the external pattern of hierarchically ordered address. Its terminal function is also signalled by its return to the frequent use of apostrophe which marked the first two lyrics, making a kind of stylistic ‘rhyme’ which binds the collection together.
At the same time the poem concentrates on Prince Henry's role as a champion of Protestant Christianity, lamenting the fact that death prevented him from completing the unification of Christendom already begun by his father's polemic efforts. The concluding lines of the poem are interesting.
O princely soule, rest thou in peace, while wee
In thine expect the hopes were ripe in thee.
(p. 126)
This first direct mention of the Prince's final rest is appropriate as the conclusion of an elegiac sequence, but at the same time it recapitulates the consolation offered at the end of ‘An Elegie’:
Curst then bee Fate that stole our blessing so,
And had for us now nothing left but woe,
Had not th'All-seeing providence yet kept
Another joy safe, that in silence slept:
And that same Royall workeman, who could frame
A Prince so worthy of immortall fame,
Lives; and long may hee live, to forme the other
His exprest image, and grace of his brother.
(p. 119)
Concentration on the hope that lives on in James and Charles helps to unify the collection of lyrics. Encouragement was first offered to Charles to imitate his brother, and then consolation in rather general terms to Frederick. In the final lyric hope for the future is given specific direction in a Christian crusade. By suggesting that consolation for the Prince's death is only fully to be achieved when the heirs to his concerns take up the work he begun, the sequence as a whole assumes an exhortatory quality.
Scaliger suggested that elegy should
be closed with exhortations; it is not so much a matter of their being mourned as it is that their present felicity, which shelters their survivors, be treated with due gravity, to further the emulation of their virtues, minds and deaths.6
The book is specifically offered to Frederick, and the work as a whole is designed to urge him to fulfil Henry's destiny as Protestant champion.
In this set of lyrics, then, an external linear ordering enables the development of a pattern of feeling which reaches its peak of intensity in the central poem. The whole is sustained by the topoi of the classical elegy, and given its focus by its direction to Frederick as dedicatee. Such a degree of integration is not to be found in any of Campion's other books, but in all of them there is evidence of care in the placing of lyrics, and in most an attempt to give an overall shape to the collection.
A range of organisational devices is exhibited in the five Bookes of Ayres. In order to build up a picture of the kinds of connections made between poems, and, more important, to establish how such connections are significant for the reader's experience of Campion's work, it is convenient to begin with the simplest relationships between individual lyrics and then to move on to consideration of patternings that inform the structure of the Bookes as whole units.
Perhaps the most obvious way of grouping poems together is to connect adjacent lyrics by some form of verbal or thematic repetition. In A Booke of Ayres three poems, Nos. 14-16, are linked by the presence of Cupid in each of them, and by play on the conventional notions of heat and cold associated with the God of Love. In these poems a common image functions principally as a kind of rhyme. A link is made, but the link is formal rather than generative of meaning; it does little more than reassure the reader that he is reading an articulated collection of poems.
In order for the reader to feel that connections have more substantial function he must be challenged by the poems to account for the fact of their juxtaposition on some higher level. A relationship of similarity between poems invites the reader to construct a context enabling them to be taken together, and it is then the nature of the variation between them that defines the kind of context that is appropriate and the deductions that may properly be made from it.
The first two lyrics of the Third Booke illustrate this reading process. In the opening poem a woman complains of desertion by her lover; in the second a man records his reaction to a mistress who has left him. The similarity of situation, albeit a conventional one, asks the reader to consider them together. Since there are two different speakers they cannot be construed as expressing a single consciousness, and the fact that both speakers have been deserted precludes the creation of a narrative context in which the second poem might be an answer to the first. The reader is therefore directed to consideration of the situational parallel between the poems.
Taken together the lyrics generalise, suggesting that the situation of desertion is common to male and female (and, of course, commonplace in love poetry). The individual speakers move closer to being-taken as types, and the reader adds to his response to each individual poem the possibility of interpreting them as characteristic of female and male responses to a stock situation. The female response is seen as passive and resigned, the male as more active and forceful. Furthermore, since these are the first two poems in the book, there is also the possibility that they are defining a thematic area—of unfaithfulness and alternative responses to it—that will be explored further in the collection as a whole. To that possibility we will return later.
Another example of a pair of lyrics spoken by a man and a woman occurs in The Second Booke, and, in a more comic vein, their pairing also directs the reader's attention to thematic parallels. No. 14 is built on bawdy innuendo. It begins:
Pin'd I am, and like to die,
And all for lacke of that which I
Doe ev'ry day refuse.
(p. 103)
As the poem proceeds it becomes clear that the cause of his distress is uncertainty about what to do with his penis. ‘It’ interrupts his poetic composition and disturbs his sleep, and the lyric concludes:
Would I had the heart and wit
To make it stand, and conjure it,
That haunts me thus with feare.
Doubtless tis some harmlesse spright,
For it by day, as well as night,
Is ready to appeare.
Be it friend, or be it foe,
Ere long Ile trie what it will doe.(7)
That the speaker is youthfully naive is indicated by his puzzled failure to understand his own sexuality. His bewilderment is mimed by his failure to name the offending object, a device which at the same time creates the humour of the poem, as he is slow to solve a riddle for which poet and reader are only too easily able to provide an answer.
So many loves have I neglected
Whose good parts might move mee,
That now I live of all rejected,
There is none will love me.
Why is mayden heate so coy?
It freezeth when it burneth,
Looseth what it might injoy,
And having lost it, mourneth.
(p. 105)
The situational parallel is much less complete than in the first pair of poems, but there is sufficient similarity for the reader to be made aware that this is not a chance juxtaposition. Where the youth suffered from failure to understand the sexual source of his distress, the woman looks back on a youth when convention dictated that she must appear not to acknowledge or understand her sexual passion. Once this basic similarity is established, the main consequence of the pairing is to point up the dissimilarities of male and female roles in sexual conduct. Where a man can come to terms with his sexuality by trying ‘what it will do’, a woman is prisoner to her sexual role. In the third stanza she makes this difference explicit:
O happy men, whose hopes are licenc'd
To discourse their passion,
While women are confin'd to silence,
Loosing wisht occasion.
Presenting the male-female difference as one of opportunity for speech introduces a witty dimension to the relationship between the two poems. For it is the male speaker of the first poem who is presented as incapable of articulating his sexual nature directly, though finally he is permitted to solve his problem through action, whereas the articulate woman, who does not evade her sexual problem in language, is inhibited by custom from translating desire into performance.
Thus far the relationship between these two lyrics has been seen as very similar in kind to the first pairing, employing a degree of comparability to enable a little exploration of differences between male and female characteristics. But in this second pair there is a hint of a relationship of a different kind, where the order of the poems also contributes to the reader's understanding. The first poem is spoken by an untried youth, the second by a woman who looks back on past failure. He has a simple hope that, having recognised the source of his discontent, he will be able to cure it by action. She, however, representing the woman upon whom he must try his power, speaks, albeit repentantly, of the ‘strangenesse’ enjoined on the female sex. The first poem is therefore qualified by the second as the reader constructs a potential narrative sequence out of the pairing, where the optimistic youth is to be thwarted by conventionally chaste lady. Taken together they contribute to the study of frustration which, as will be seen, runs throughout The Second Booke.
The desire to bring poems together by constructing a narrative frame in which to place them is deeply embedded in any reader's mind. A number of pairs and short runs of poems throughout Campion's work explicitly invite such a reading.
A straightforward example is to be found in The First Booke. This little sequence begins with one of Campion's better-known poems:
Never weather-beaten Saile more willing bent to shore,
Never tyred Pilgrims limbs affected slumber more,
Then my weary 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 joyes 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 onely see;
O come quickly, glorious Lord, and raise my spright to thee.
(p. 70)
This lyric elaborates the simple statement ‘I am old and ready for death’. Its force derives in part from the quiet appropriateness of the amplificatory imagery in the first stanza, derived from journeying in the three elements of sea, earth and air and sanctioned by conventional association with the voyage and pilgrimage of life.
The next lyric begins:
Lift up to heav'n, sad wretch, thy heavy spright;
What though thy sinnes thy due destruction threat?
The Lord exceedes in mercy as in might;
His ruth is greater, though thy crimes be great.
(p. 72)
The first line signals a relationship with the previous poem, in the correspondence of ‘heavy spright’ with the ‘weary spright’ previously encountered, and in the recapitulation of desire for heaven and of the image of ascent. The second line, however, takes the reader in a new direction. Whereas ‘Never weather-beaten Saile’ is built upon a desire for death seen as rest from labour, this poem presents death as destroyer, as just punishment for sin.
At first it might seem that this is no more than a gestural link between two largely independent lyrics presenting alternative visions of our ultimate destiny. But the reader invited by initial similarity to meditate further on the relationship between the poems looks back with a different awareness to the first poem, and realises that a line at first passed over assumes a new prominence. In its second stanza the reader was told that ‘Glory there the Sun outshines, whose beames the blessed onely see’. The second part of the line asserts a basic Christian truth—heaven is for the righteous—but the exclusive force of the word ‘onely’ barely registers in a context where the blessed are primarily presented as witnesses to God's supreme brightness, and inversion of natural word-order itself contributes to suppression of the adjectival status of the word. The reader then might supply a connection between the poems by ‘filling in the gap’ between them by a conjectured narrative. The poet desires death, but then begins, like Hamlet, to ask himself what dreams may haunt his eternal rest if he is not of the company of the ‘blessed’. The second poem exposes that fear in order to allay it. That some such narrative conjecture is not merely wild supplementation of the text is further demonstrated by the second poem's conclusion.
Remorce for all that truely mourne hath place;
Not God, but men of him themselves deprive:
Strive then, and hee will help; call him, hee'll heare:
The Sonne needes not the Fathers fury feare.
In ‘Never weather-beaten Saile’ the poet had called upon the Lord to come quickly. The injunction here in the penultimate line invites him to call again, but with a more instructed faith and a clearer sense of his dependence upon the Lord's mercy
The third poem in this little set also establishes immediately a relationship with the previous two poems:
Loe, when backe mine eye,
Pilgrim-like I cast,
What fearefull wayes I spye,
Which, blinded, I securely past.
But now heav'n hath drawne
From my browes that night;
As when the day doth dawne,
So cleares my long imprison'd sight.(8)
(p. 73)
The image of pilgrimage links it with the first poem, as does the picture of heaven (where no ‘vapour dims our eyes’) clearing the sight of the poet. Narratively the link with ‘Lift up to heav'n’ is much closer to the surface than had been the narrative connection between the first two poems. The poet, reassured in the second poem, has had the confidence to strive with God's help, and has lifted his heart to heaven. His prayer has been answered, and he may look back at the Hell he has passed and see it for what it is with regenerated spiritual sight.
That these three lyrics trace a narrative progression is emphasised by the distance between first and third poems manifest in the final stanzas:
Straight to Heav'n I rais'd
My restored sight,
And with loud voyce I prais'd
The Lord of ever-during light.
And since I had stray'd
From his wayes so wide,
His grace I humbly pray,
Henceforth to be my guard and guide.
In place of crying for the Lord to come is a calling out of praise; instead of a demand to be released from pilgrimage is an acquiescence in continuing life supported by the grace of God. The three poems, then, trace a little spiritual path from weariness through repentance to security in faith.
In The Second Booke the first four poems may similarly be taken together as reflecting a sequence of attitudes in the mind of a lover. The first poem has a moralising flavour:
Vaine men, whose follies make a God of Love,
Whose blindnesse beauty doth immortall deeme:
Prayse not what you desire, but what you prove,
Count those things good that are, not those that seeme:
I cannot call her true that's false to me,
Nor make of women more then women be.
How faire an entrance breakes the way to love;
How rich of golden hope and gay delight;
What hart cannot a modest beauty move?
Who, seeing cleare day once, will dreame of night?
Shee seem'd a Saint that brake her faith with mee,
But prov'd a woman, as all other be.
So bitter is their sweet, that true content
Unhappy men in them may never finde;
Ah, but without them, none; both must consent,
Else uncouth are the joyes of eyther kinde.
Let us then prayse their good, forget their ill:
Men must be men, and women women still.
(p. 85)
This is a much more complex and elusive poem than it seems at first. Certain features contributing to its complexity may be picked out for their particular relevance to the present discussion of sequence.
Taken as a whole the poem's three stanzas form a pattern where the first and last, of sententious cast, frame a stanza of retrospective narrative. In the first the poet encourages the reader to adopt a realistic attitude to love. In the second he looks back to a time when his illusions about his mistress were shattered. Thus far the reader, as he ‘unpacks’ the poem, has little difficulty. In narrative terms the second stanza precedes the first, and the reader accepts the reversal of their order as reflecting the poet's desire to assert ‘this is what I think, and this is why I think it’. But the third stanza, for all that it appears to return to the manner of the first and by its verbal reminiscence in the last two lines to be echoing its sentiments, in fact presents attitudes significantly different from those of the opening. Where that had advocated a stern realism, here we are encouraged to edit experience, to forget women's ill. In seeking to explain the modification of attitude the reader must look back to the second stanza, and see the third as a response not so much to the experience it recollects, as to the experience of recollection itself. In remembering a time full of ‘golden hope’ the poet realises that, however miserable he might have been, future happiness will still depend upon some contact with womankind. A way must be found of accommodating this realisation; and the final stanza, somewhat uneasily, suggests that selective response might be the answer.
In order to see the significance of the placing of the second stanza, one only has to imagine what sort of poem one might have had if the order of the first two stanzas were reversed. The lyric would then have been perfectly satisfactory without any continuation, since the order ‘I experienced that, and hence I conclude this’ is both more conventional and also aligns the sequence of experience with the sequence of expression that the reader follows in the poem.
The inversion of narrative order makes possible a double time-scheme. Super-imposed upon the sequence of event and reflection on it that the reader reconstructs from the poem is the time of the poem's composition as reflected in the order of words on the page. This double time-scheme helps to generate the richness of effect of the poem, as it involves the reader in responding both to the report on experience and to the experience of the poem itself. The last stanza makes sense only if he has understood that the second stanza is both a characterisation of an experience that is past, and at the same time a poetic present provoking immediate reaction in the third stanza.
The sequence of poems which follow can best be understood as a kind of clearer re-writing of the narrative of this lyric. The next poem, ‘How easl'y wert thou chained’, develops a picture of the time when ‘shee seem'd a Saint’. At the end of the first stanza the lover writes:
Yet 'tis no woman leaves me,
For such may prove unjust:
A Goddesse thus deceives me,
Whose faith who could mistrust?
(p. 87)
He has here not attained the detachment to recognise his literary characterisation of his Goddesse as the self-sustaining fantasy that it is.
The opening of the third lyric shows that the lover has now gained the kind of bitter understanding recorded in the first stanza of ‘Vaine men’:
Harden now thy tyred hart with more then flinty rage;
Ne'er let her false teares henceforth thy constant grief asswage.
(p. 88)
These two poems have an implied narrative that matches the terms the opening lyric of the book established for the illusion of love and the reality of rejection.
The fourth poem suddenly changes direction, as the lady relents, and the poet exults:
O what unhop't for sweet supply!
O what joyes exceeding!
(p. 89)
There is little overt connection between this poem and those which precede it. The reason for accepting it as part of a sequence is primarily that, after three poems having a reasonably overt relationship, the ‘law of good continuation’9 suggests that, unless there is decisive evidence to the contrary, the pattern of connection will be continued. Furthermore, the pattern it makes, once accepted, is very much sanctioned by literary convention. The irruption of joy in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella at Sonnet 69, where, after long rejection the lover suddenly feels ‘I, I, O I may say that she is mine’,10 is but one obvious analogue. In any case, once a reader has responded to the invitation to generate a narrative or quasi-narrative relationship between this poem and those immediately before it, his instinct is then validated by the realisation that this poem fleshes out the suggestion of the last stanza of the opening lyric. Here indeed are the joys that ensue when ‘both consent’.
In this group, then, the complex pattern of the first poem is unpicked and clarified by the three poems that follow it, each treating one of its parts without complication. At the same time their effect is modified by the ironies which the opening lyric generates.
Thus far it is relationships between adjacent poems that have been considered. It is obviously also the case that in a collection of lyrics relationships between poems separated one from the other can and do carry structural weight. (Such is the case in many sonnet sequences, for example).
A Booke of Ayres, however, does not, in fact, offer a particularly rich coherence. The run of Cupid poems has already been mentioned;11 a number of lyrics deal with sexual conquest (Nos. 3, 5, 7, 8, 11), but such motifs and images are so commonplace that it would be inappropriate to make much of them. The only exception is, perhaps, lyrics dealing with death as the end of love. It figures in the first two poems and the fourth, is alluded to in the ninth and surfaces again in the nineteenth and twentieth poems. It is significant particularly in that the first poem, ‘My sweetest Lesbia’, with its triumph of love in death contrasts with the bitterness of the murdered lover and dead lady in ‘When thou must home’. The recollection and revaluation of mortality makes a satisfying frame for the collection before the religious coda of the final poem ‘Come let us sound’. But in general, A Booke of Ayres is a collection of poems loosely related, rather than a coherent whole.
The First Booke of Ayres, by contrast, seems much more fully controlled. In part this is an inevitable by-product of its exclusive concentration on religious subjects, in part also, a consequence of the restriction of stylistic range that the subject matter suggests as appropriate.
The proper style for religious verse was frequently a matter for debate in this period, as Barbara Lewalski has shown.12 Campion's position is clearly set out in two adjacent poems. In ‘To Musicke bent’ he writes:
To Musicke bent is my retyred minde,
And faine would I some song of pleasure sing:
But in vaine joyes no comfort now I finde:
From heav'nly thoughts all true delight doth spring.
Thy power, O God, thy mercies to record
Will sweeten ev'ry note, and ev'ry word.
(p. 66)
The beauty of devotional verse inheres in the subject, not in the treatment given to it, so that the effort to speak of the mercies of God will of itself ‘sweeten’ the words for the reader. Consequently, as the next lyric states:
Strive not yet for curious wayes:
Concord pleaseth more, the less 'tis strained.
(p. 66)
Campion's style, therefore, throughout the collection is, as Davis suggests, ‘typically that of pithy literal statement … concentrating on clarity of outline and terseness’. But though the restricted style and subject matter of the collection give the reader an initial sense of its sameness, closer attention reveals both greater variety and at the same time a more profound unity than might at first be supposed.
The opening two lyrics define the territory, thematic and stylistic, within which the greater part of the book operates. ‘Author of Light’ is a passionate prayer uttered by the poet from a sense of his own sinfulness. It is concerned with the life of the spirit, and belongs with the Biblical kind represented by the more introspective Psalms.
The second poem in the book, ‘The man of life upright’, in contrast, concerns life in the world rather than the life of the spirit, is classical rather than Biblical in its inspiration (though it is very much a Christianised version of the Horace Ode which is its starting point).13 The poet here speaks as a public and moralising voice, rather than as an introspective individual.
The story of the book they initiate is in no small measure an elaboration and investigation of the double perspective upon Christian life they present. In the process the marked distinctiveness of their mode of address is eroded. The detached moralist's voice of ‘The man of life upright’ becomes, in some poems, more urgent and exhortatory, though still preserving a sententiousness which functions as a guarantee of the speaker's wisdom. ‘Tune thy Musicke to thy heart’ is one such poem, gravely answering the more personally expressed opening of the previous poem, ‘To Musicke bent is my retyred minde’.
‘Awake, awake, thou heavy spright’ blurs the two voices in an interesting fashion. It can be taken as dramatising the poet's internal consciousness of his own spiritual lethargy (so placing the reader in the same relationship to it as he occupies for ‘Author of Light’). But the reader can also take the second-person pronoun as being addressed to himself, so that he is the recipient of the lyric's exhortation in the same way as he had been for ‘The man of life upright’.
‘Seeke the Lord’ separates the two modes of address. The first two stanzas are unambiguously aimed at the reader, but in the last two the poet speaks in his own voice. The effect of this shift is to give dramatic energy to the poem, as the poet seems to be persuaded by the beginning of his own lyric to abandon the ways of the world.
This is one direction that the collection takes to bring together the private and public voices of its opening. In quite a different fashion the public voice of ‘The man of life upright’ is expanded in its range to take on a role as spokesman not for an individual, but for the whole people of God. This voice, like the voice of ‘Author of Light’, has its original in the Psalms, but Psalms of a different kind from the introspective meditation of ‘Out of my soules deapth’. ‘Sing a song of joy’, made up of a tissue of scriptural echoes, principally from the Psalms (see below pp. 33-35), is a clear example of the type, and has explicit connection with the content of ‘The man of life upright’. It celebrates the deliverance of the people of God from bondage (a function clarified by its juxtaposition with a paraphrase of the Psalm of the Babylonian captivity, ‘As by the streames of Babilon’), and ends:
Let us then rejoyce,
Sounding loud his prayse:
So will hee heare our voyce,
And blesse on earth our peacefull dayes.
(p. 75)
The peaceful life figures at the end of this poem as it had at the end of ‘The man of life upright’. There it was the reward for personal integrity, here the consequence of the faithfulness of the people of God. ‘Sing a song of joy’ is in its turn linked to an earlier poem that springs rather surprisingly upon the reader, the ode on the fifth of November, ‘Bravely deckt’. In retrospect the reader understands it as a hymn of praise spoken by the British as God's ‘chosen Nation’ for a deliverance as spectacular in evidencing God's mercy as the deliverance of Israel from Babylon. Both these poems present an ideal public life of peace and content corresponding to the individual prescription of ‘The man of life upright’.
But this personal ideal of a quiet pilgrimage achieved by virtuous conduct, is significantly at odds with the attitude expressed in ‘Author of Light’. There a clear opposition is set up between the way of the world and the way of the spirit:
Lord, light me to thy blessed way:
For, blinde with worldly vaine desires, I wander as a stray.
(p. 59)
Thus, though the order of the first two poems implies that the journey of the spirit necessarily precedes the possibility of a peaceful earthly life, their juxtaposition does not indicate any way of translating a negative view of life as a dark wandering into a positive espousal of life's ‘quiet pilgrimage’. We have already seen one exploration of the image of pilgrimage in the poems which follow ‘Never weather-beaten Saile’, but it is only in a later sequence that the tensions set up by the first two poems in the book are fully resolved. This group begins:
Awake, awake, thou heavy spright,
That sleep'st the deadly sleepe of sinne;
Rise now, and walke the wayes of light,
'Tis not too late yet to begin.
Seeke heav'n earely, seeke it late,
True Faith still findes an open gate.
Get up, get up, thou leaden man:
Thy tracks to endlesse joy or paine
Yeelds but the modell of a span;
Yet burnes out thy lifes lampe in vaine.
One minute bounds thy bane, or blisse,
Then watch, and labour while time is.
(p. 76)
Here the twin aspects of the journeying image are brought together in a single poem. The spiritual journey to the ‘wayes of light’ can only be made as man treads the ‘tracks’ of his earthly life from birth to death. This introduces a sharply temporal dimension into the image, an awareness reinforced by the next poem, ‘Come chearfull day’, with its sombre refrain ‘soe ev'ry day we live, a day wee dye’ (p. 76). In turn it gives much greater urgency to the following poem ‘Seeke the Lord’ than had obtained in the earlier ‘Loe when backe mine eyes’ to which it is closely related. Here there is a sense of struggle, rather than of wonder at God's grace. The awareness that we must ‘watch and labour’ is then carried over to the beginning of the final poem in the group, ‘Lighten heavy hart’, a moralistic lyric condemning sloth. In this little group of poems, then, the image of journeying is used to suggest, neither the peacefulness of life's pilgrimage, nor the abandonment of the world for the ways of God, but rather the immediate and urgent necessity to turn the journey of life itself into a time for the pilgrimage of grace.
This brief discussion of some of the poems that manipulate a standard Christian image demonstrates how Campion explores and tests its resonance and implication. For the reader it means that an idea so conventional as to be easily passed over is revitalised and its suggestiveness is heightened, if he is prepared to consider the poems together rather than singly.
Something of the same is true of the rhyming and chiming of images of light which figure in over half the poems in the book. Light is a property of God and heaven. It is available to man as an illumination for his path (‘Author of light’), or as a metaphor for the path itself (‘Awake, awake, thou heavy spright’). Light may shine through man when he is infused by divine grace (‘View mee, Lord’), or else represent the new light of perception that becomes his when he has gained his spiritual goal (‘Never weather-beaten saile’, ‘Loe, when backe mine eye’ and ‘Seeke the Lord’). Used in this context its opposite is either the world's false light (‘Seeke the Lord’) or, in many poems, the darkness and opacity of the world. It may also be opposed more specifically to the darkness of sin (‘Bravely deckt’). The poems also explore the possibilities of the opposition ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ (especially ‘Awake, awake, thou heavy spright’ and ‘Lighten, heavy heart thy spright’), often using the punning possibility of playing with both senses of the word.
The play of these images from poem to poem adds up to a network of connection that brings the various poems in which they occur into relationships of mutual enrichment, and at the same time goes some way to ensure that the reader gives proper attention to images that are so commonplace as to run the risk of seeming merely mechanical.
The First Booke is perhaps the least regarded of Campion's collections. While it would be silly to pretend that he is the equal of Donne or Herbert as a religious poet, yet it does seem to me that, if the lyrics are taken as a whole, they are rich in suggestion and dexterous in their craft.
Some of the effect of The First Booke derives from the uniformity of its subject matter and the limited range of its style. The Second Booke, published with it, is much more varied. The poems are all love lyrics, but, as Puttenham observed, variety is part of the decorum of love poetry.14 Nonetheless it is possible to discern in the collection as a whole a purposeful and structured selection from the huge available repertory of amatory topics.
The key to the book's structure is offered in its dedication to the young Henry, Lord Clifford. The poet distinguishes the book from its predecessor in these terms:
Pure Hymnes, such as the seaventh day loves, doe leade;
Grave age did justly chalenge those of mee:
Those weeke-day workes, in order that succeede,
Your youth best fits, and yours, young Lord, they be.
(p. 84)
Obviously the basic pattern is ‘religion for age, love for youth’, but the selection of the love poems is dictated by an attempt to make them especially appropriate to the youth of their dedicatee. The opening poem, ‘Vaine men, whose follies’, is the only one which sounds any note of detachment from the business of love. It acts as a kind of ironic preface from an older poet who knows that ‘men must be men, and women women still’, and that no amount of aged wisdom will prevent youth from treading the circular path from despair to hope and back again. The basic order of the poems reflects a loose narrative sequence telling a familiar ‘story’ of a hopeful lover, thematically appropriate to youth in its varied but continuous concentration on frustration, a frustration that grows ever more intense as the sequence proceeds.
After the opening run of four poems, already sufficiently discussed, the apparent triumph of ‘O, what unhop't for sweet supply’ is swiftly undermined in the next poem, which concludes:
But, from her bowre of Joy since I
Must now excluded be,
And shee will not relieve my cares,
Which none can helpe but shee:
My comfort in her love shall dwell,
Her love lodge in my brest;
And though not in her bowre, yet I
Shall in her temple rest.
(p. 91)
This lady, like Stella in Sidney's sequence, clearly offers her love conditionally on the lover's chaste behaviour. The poet, at the same time, leaves little doubt of the specifically sexual ‘relief’ he seeks.
In the poems that follow the lover retreats from the lady, and diminishes the extent of his sexual demands upon her. In the sixth poem he wonders whether he dare declare his love, and thereby gain ‘pity’ which would satisfy the desire he tries vainly to repress. In the eighth, ‘O deare, that I with thee might live’ he offers a mingling of minds, in the tenth asks only for kisses, since ‘That which kinde and harmlesse is, / None can deny us’.
The retreat halts when, in ‘Sweet, exclude me not’ the lover's sexual demands surface again. He pleads before the closed door of his betrothed to anticipate their wedding night. The next two poems see the lover once more in retreat but with the innuendo of ‘Pin'd I am, and like to die’ (discussed above) the temperature rises. In two poems which follow (after the interlude of ‘Though your strangenesse’, to which we will return) sexual ambition is most explicitly declared.
They are interesting poems, for in both there is a subtle modification of the reader's understanding of the situation they imply as the poems proceed, suggesting that gratification of desire is in the mind of the speaker only, not in the likely conduct of the lady who is addressed.
The first begins confidently:
Come away, arm'd with loves delights,
Thy sprightfull graces bring with thee:
When loves longing fights,
They must the sticklers be.
(p. 108)
But then a note of uncertainty creeps into the poem:
Come quickly, come, the promis'd houre is wel-nye spent,
And pleasure, being too much deferr'd, looseth her best content.
The time during which the lady promised to turn up is almost gone—and we wonder whether she had any intention of keeping her appointment. In the second stanza the lover begins to share that apprehension, as anxious questions and a shift to the third person pronoun mime his anxiety:
Is shee come? O, how neare is shee?
How farre yet from this friendly place?
How many steps from me?
When shall I her imbrace?
These armes Ile spred, which onely at her sight shall close,
Attending as the starry flowre that the Suns noone-tide knowes.
We end in the future tense, as the lover vainly tries to salvage something out of the lusty hopes he entertained so securely at the beginning of the poem.
Almost exactly the same revaluation occurs in ‘Come you pretty false-ey'd wanton’, as a boastfully confident apprehension of the lady in the first stanza turns into emptily conditional threats in the second.
A very significant dimension of the patterning of the book is created by the poems in the collection spoken in whole or in part by women. The first of them, ‘Good men, shew, if you can tell’, as we have seen, initiates the parallel consideration of men and women. ‘So many loves have I neglected’ has also been discussed earlier, but it may be added that it connects directly with a comment made by the uncertain male lover of the sixth poem:
Women, courted, have the hand
To discard what they distaste:
But those Dames whom none demand
Want oft what their wils embract.
(p. 92)
The regret of the female speaker of ‘So many loves’ seems to endorse what this male wishes women would understand—that they will be sorry they did not offer him the ‘grace’ he euphemistically demands.
The next poem, ‘Though your strangenesse’, presents a picture of a woman putting off her lover with ingenious excuses, while being friendly to other men. In this lyric there is a clear gap between the woman's experience and her lover's naiveté. Its effect is to undermine masculine self-confidence, boosted by the immediately preceding picture of a woman regretting her missed opportunities.
The last of this set, ‘A secret love or two’, continues the progression from innocent maid to experienced woman, as a married woman justifies her infidelity to her husband. He has no cause for complaint, since, no matter how many lovers she takes, ‘His owne he never wants, but hath it duely’. The effect of this cynically witty poem is, in its context, rather subtler than its comic tone suggests. For in the frustrated mind of the young man, characterised with increasing intensity in the latter part of the book, the object he most desires is a female willing and able to answer to his desires. But the pattern of increasingly experienced and liberal ladies, at one level corresponding to his dreams, suggests that a woman ready to co-operate would also be a woman able to deceive him and exercise power over him. If, as the opening poem suggests, ‘men must be men, and women women still’, it is perhaps safer for the male if they stick to their literary sexual stereotypes of hopeless lover and chaste beauty.
The Second Booke, then, has a structure which enables the poems to be read as a loose quasi-narrative sequence. The sequential pattern in turn enables the reader to come to an ironic perspective upon youthful frustration as male and female poems are juxtaposed. The ironic perspective is prefigured in the opening lyric, but is only fully available if the set of poems are taken as a whole.
The three books so far discussed have each displayed structures of different kinds. The loosely associative pattern of A Booke of Ayres is different from the thematic and stylistic exploration of The First Booke and that in its turn is different from the quasi-narrative structure of The Second Booke. The Third Booke is patterned according to yet another principle. It is dedicated to Thomas Monson, recently released from the Tower where he had been confined on suspicion of complicity in the Overbury affair, and is offered to him explicitly as tribute to his patience and fortitude, and at the same time as an aid in dispelling the gloom of his misfortune. Unless the reader is aware of this external control on the book's shape and tone, he will miss a good deal of its impact.
The occasional nature of the collection is reflected, as Davis suggests, in the overall pattern of the book, which he describes thus:
it takes Monson through a definite tonal progression from grief to light-heartedness. The first half is very dark: its dominant emotions are negative ones (as the reiterated word ‘distaste’ implies), such as complaint, disappointment, anger and cynical disenchantment. Suddenly with ‘Now winter nights’ the tone rises to gay conviviality, a tone which is sustained in the rest of the volume, where if cynicism exists, it is the gay cynicism of the coquettes who sing ‘Silly boy’, ‘If thou longst’, or ‘So quicke, so hot, so mad’, or where male disenchantment is spiced with comic acceptance.
(pp. 128-9)
This characterisation of the volume needs to be qualified in one important respect. ‘Tonally’ the progression may be ever upward from gloom to cheerfulness, but this pattern plays against an arched structure of the poems' subjects. The first part of the collection deals with disappointed love; the three central poems, ‘Now winter nights’, ‘Awake thou spring’ and ‘What is it all’ speak of contentment in love; thereafter, with only two exceptions, we return to the opening territory of thwarted love. It is seen differently, is accepted more patiently than had been the case in the first part of the book—but that is the point of the central pivot. It makes possible an exercise in revaluation. Awareness of the presence of this arched, ABA thematic pattern also means that the reader is alert to the possibility that deeper notes are sounded in the latter part of the book than he might expect if he were armed only with Davis's pattern of progressive lightness.
The volume's relationship to Monson is most obvious in those lyrics not directly concerned with topics of love. ‘O griefe, O spight’, with its litany of complaint against a corrupt society, is the most striking, but ‘So tyr'd are all my thoughts’, depicting a state of dejection growing from an idle mind, has obvious application to the plight of an imprisoned man. ‘Were my hart’ contains the clearest reference to the circumstances that caused Monson's imprisonment in the line ‘Hidden mischiefe to conceale in State and Love is treason’, since it was precisely the concealment of a murder for love for three years that had occasioned the whole business.
These poems draw attention to themselves by their departure from the amatory subjects of most of the poems. The reader accepts their presence because of their relationship with the book's occasion, and then, in turn, feeds them back into his reading of the love poems. The reader is enabled, without distorting the character of the love lyrics, to see them also as standing in a metaphoric relationship to Monson's imprisonment and release.
Once this perspective is accepted, then several significant patterns become apparent. The first is an insistence on truth and falsehood that is particularly marked in the earlier part of the book. The eighth poem opens:
O griefe, O spight, to see poore Vertue scorn'd,
Truth far exil'd, False art lov'd, Vice ador'd.
(p. 142)
And the note sounded here is reflected in almost all the adjacent love lyrics. In the opening poem a woman complains of ‘His faithlesse stay’ and of her lover's readiness to ‘breake vowes’. The second remarks ‘True love abides to th'houre of dying; / False love is ever flying’. (p. 134) ‘Maydes are simple’, the fourth poem, opens its second stanza ‘Truth a rare flower now is growne’, and woman is advised in the sixth lyric to ‘prove true’ to one man. Finally the eleventh lyric opens with the sad comment ‘If Love loves truth, then women doe not love’.
The applicability to Monson's position of so stressing the elements of faith and truth in love relationships is not hard to understand. He must have felt, as he languished in prison though he had never been convicted of any offence, that he had been betrayed by those of high position he should have been able to trust.
The book does more than describe a problem; it also explores the range of possible responses to a world where trust is liable to be misplaced. Reactions might take the form of passive lament (as in ‘Oft have I sigh'd’), despair (in ‘O griefe’), resolve to have nothing to do with the whole business (in ‘Maydes are simple’), or bitterness (in ‘Now let her change’). In a few poems the difficulties are more directly confronted.
‘Could my heart more tongues imploy’ comes near the end of the collection, and presents a complex reaction to betrayal (not at all the ‘convivial’ or ‘light’ tone that Davis would have us see throughout the latter part of the book).
Could my heart more tongues imploy
Then it harbours thoughts of griefe,
It is now so farre from joy
That it scarce could aske reliefe.
Truest hearts by deedes unkinde
To despayre are most enclin'd.
Happy mindes, that can redeeme
Their engagements how they please,
That no joyes or hopes esteeme,
Halfe so pretious as their ease!
Wisedome should prepare men so
As if they did all foreknow.
Yet no Arte or Caution can
Growne affections easily change;
Use is such a Lord of Man
That he brookes worst what is strange.
Better never to be blest
Then to loose all at the best.
(p 160)
Some of the haunting quality of this lyric derives from the near suppression of the implied situation to which it is a response. It is only with the second line of the last stanza that the plight of the speaker, as one betrayed by a woman, is allowed unambiguously to the surface.
This is only one aspect of its indirectness. The statement of the opening stanza is that the speaker, because of the quality of his love, suffers the more keenly. At first it seems that the second stanza offers a preferred alternative of disengagement. But that possibility is then rejected in the third stanza, not on any moral grounds, but on grounds of simple observation and truth to experience. The despair of the ending excludes the positive alternative that the second stanza had entertained.
Other possible attitudes to betrayal are offered in the collection. A cynical realism, accepting the deceitfulness of women in ‘If Love loves truth’ or the faults of man in ‘Never love unlesse you can’ is one response; the fatalism of ‘Kinde are her answers’ is another. The last poem in the book, ‘Shall I then hope when faith is fled’ might seem at first sight to be nothing more than a cynical acceptance of woman's faithlessness, but in its final stanza there is complex play with the idea of freedom:
So my deare freedome have I gain'd
Through her unkindnesse and disgrace;
Yet could I ever live enchain'd
As shee my service did embrace
But shee is chang'd, and I am free:
Faith failing her, Love dyed in mee.
At first glance the beginning of this stanza seems highly appropriate for the end of a collection offered to the newly freed Monson. In a way its resigned acceptance of unfaithfulness is an apt termination of the discussion of truth, faithfulness, and the response to its absence that has figured throughout the book. But the poem also exposes quite emphatically the limits of the metaphorical transferability of poems of love to Monson's situation. Obviously there are no circumstances in which he would wish ‘really’ to live imprisoned for ever. So, after teasing the reader throughout the book with the possibility of allowing the occasional nature of the collection to affect his understanding of love poems, at the end the poetry returns us firmly from that reality to the world of literary lovers.
There are other poems in the book which diversify this main sustaining theme; there are other ways in which the reader recognises an appropriateness to Monson's situation (the fact that the central poems all share a joy in human conversation, for example, is ideally suited to Monson's return to society). But enough has been said to demonstrate that this book, like its two predecessors, gains immeasurably in richness if the source and nature of the relationships between its individual poems are allowed to become part of the reader's awareness as he moves through it.
No such claims can be made for The Fourth Booke. Beyond the placing of the bawdier poems at the end, I can discover no other real structure in the work as a whole. It is not necessarily any the worse for that. In its delighted espousal of the variety of love poetry it offers an appropriate contrast to the more serious tone of The Third Booke with which it was published.
II
The preceding discussion of sequence and of relationships between poems making up Campion's six collections of airs, apart from suggesting that the ‘right handling’ of his poems should involve attention to the books as whole units, also serves as preparation for the discussion of individual lyrics which makes up the rest of this chapter. For in two important respects the problems raised in considering larger structures are analogous to those facing the reader of a single lyric.
In the first place, the process whereby a reader, teased with similarities between adjacent poems, constructs a framework which makes that similarity yield meaning, is identical to the effort he will make to construct from the evidence a single poem offers some situation which holds together its various elements in a shape that answers to the promise of coherence held out by the organised nature of its formal components. He might, for example, supply a situation to which the lyric can be construed as a response, or derive a pattern of feeling which makes psychological sense in terms of his own experience.
Secondly, just as in reading a sequence of poems the reader's understanding of one text depends upon another, so, as recent criticism frequently insists, the reading of all texts is controlled by a reader's sense of their literary relationships. In what follows relationships of subject matter, of generic kind or of linguistic ‘code’, will be brought to bear in discussing the way individual lyrics present themselves to the reader. These relationships, like those that subsist between adjacent lyrics, may be more or less closely controlled by the text itself. Some poems declare their affiliations very specifically as translations and imitations, while others manipulate a much less determined range of reminiscence. The thread on which the ensuing discussion is strung is a movement from one end to the other of that scale.
Imitation of texts was, of course, fundamental to the Renaissance view of the poet's craft. By diligent perusal of other men's writings the poet stocked his mind with topics, learnt the arts of writing, and, if his sources were classical or Biblical, conferred upon his own composition the authority borrowed from their status. At the same time slavish repetition was condemned—since a mere copy must necessarily be inferior to an original. Renaissance authors recognised that the imitator stamped himself upon his original even in the act of translation, and required therefore that the writer be self-consciously aware of his creative role, and not shirk the responsibility it laid upon him.15
From the reader's point of view, imitation poses a rather different set of problems. In the case of a poem whose original is so well-known as to be universally available he has comparatively little difficulty in accepting that the relationship of text and source is necessarily part of its explicit meaning. When the source of a poem is only revealed by scholarly investigation, and especially when it is not at all clear that a contemporary would have been likely to have known the original, then it might be felt that the information is relevant to a study of the transforming power of the imagination, but not to the effect or understanding of the poem before him.
The best place to begin the discussion is with two imitations where there is no doubt about the source, no question of its status, and no problem about the significance of its relationship to Campion's version. These are two of the Psalm paraphrases from The First Booke, ‘Out of my soules deapth’ and ‘Sing a song of joy’.
To facilitate comparison I quote in full the first of these lyrics and the version in the Book of Common Prayer. (Campion might well have used the Geneva version, but it does not seem in this case to be significantly different.)
Out of my soules deapth to thee my cryes have sounded:
Let thine eares my plaints receive, on just feare grounded.
Lord, should'st thou weigh our faults, who's not confounded?
But with grace thou censur'st thine when they have erred,
Therefore shall thy blessed name be lov'd and feared:
Ev'n to thy throne my thoughts and eyes are reared.
Thee alone my hopes attend, on thee relying;
In thy sacred word I'le trust, to thee fast flying,
Long ere the Watch shall breake, the morne descrying.
In the mercies of our God who live secured,
May of full redemption rest in him assured;
Their sinne-sicke soules by him shall be recured.
(p. 62)
- Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord hear my voice.
- O let thine ears consider well: the voice of my complaint.
- If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss: O Lord, who may abide it?
- For there is mercy with thee: therefore shalt thou be feared.
- I look for the Lord; my soul doth wait for him: in his word is my trust.
- My soul fleeth unto the Lord: before the morning watch, I say, before the morning watch.
- O Israel, trust in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy: and with him is plenteous redemption.
- And he shall redeem Israel: from all his sins.
In a Biblical paraphrase of this sort it is self-evident that modifications of and departures from the original register as an important element in directing the reader's understanding of what the poet is concerned to say. There was plenty of precedent for Campion's activity in providing a metrical version of the Psalm, and, in case of this, one of the Penitential Psalms, a long tradition sanctioning the writing of descants and free paraphrases upon it, where the poet absorbs the Psalmist's voice entirely into himself.16
Campion's version is quite close to the original. This in itself implies a more obedient posture before the sacred text than do the elaborations of a poet like Wyatt. It does not, however, preclude the reader's realisation, when the two texts are compared, of consistent and coherent adaptation.
The structure of the original is tidied up in the poem's division into four stanzas. In general the first and third express the prayers and promises of the poet, the second and fourth describe the merciful qualities of the Lord which guarantee that the prayer will be received. As a consequence of this arrangement some expansion of the Biblical text is needed in the second stanza. The nature of this additional material, in its turn, clarifies two of the significant ways in which the poem as a whole modifies its original.
In the sixth (new) line the posture of the poet is quiescent before the Lord's throne. This humble attitude typifies the consistent softening of the tone of the Psalmist throughout the lyric. In the first line ‘cryes’ becomes the subject of the verb, not ‘I’, and the preremptory ‘Lord, hear my voice’ is omitted; in the seventh, the Psalmist's ‘I look for the Lord’ becomes the more prayerful ‘Thee alone my hopes attend’. The future tense of line eight suggests a petitionary posture compared with the self-justification of the original.
The second significant modification is the addition, in the fifth line, of the word ‘lov'd’ to the Biblical ‘feared’. This signals that the poet is aware, as the Psalmist could not be, of the Christian revelation of the Lord of Love, and ties in with an unobtrusive but very significant Christianization of the original throughout the poem. In the fourth line ‘mercy’ becomes ‘grace’. This apparently trivial alteration is in fact heavily loaded, marking not only the transition from Old Testament to the New Dispensation, but also placing this version of the Psalm securely in the Protestant camp. Both Luther and Calvin in their commentaries on this Psalm use it as evidence of the primacy of grace, as distinct from the Papists' ‘mingling their own merits, satisfaction and worthy preparation … with the grace of God’.17 (If this is taken in conjunction with the modification in line eight which adds the adjective ‘sacred’ to the ‘word’, suggesting a characteristically Protestant emphasis on the Bible, then this poem alone tends to indicate that Campion was not, at least at this time, a Catholic, as has been argued.18)
The last significant modification is in the final stanza, where exhortation to the Israelites is turned into statement of God's mercy. The gloss on this verse in the Geneva Bible says: ‘he sheweth to whom the mercie of God doth appertaine: to Israel, that is, to the Church and not to the reprobate’. Something of this standard Christian interpretation of Israel as type of the Church is apparent in Campion's final stanza, but he incorporates the idea within the generally individual and prayerful posture of his version. The recollection of the Psalm's opening in the phrase ‘sinne-sicke soules’, not only gives a nicely contained quality to the lyric's form, but also emphasises how the initial expansion of the Psalm's opening phrase has suited, even conditioned, the personal meditative stance that is maintained throughout.
In this poem, then, there is plenty of evidence of what one might call, in fashionable phrase, ‘intertextual dialogue’ between the poem and its original. The reader's knowledge of the text and status of the original not only sharpens his sense of Campion's poetic skill in a general sort of way, but enables him properly to take the force and implication of the modifications that the poet makes.
‘Sing a song of joy’ is rather different in that it is not a straightforward paraphrase of a single Psalm. Davis suggests that it is a ‘free paraphrase of the first five verses of Psalm 104’, but that is far too simple. The lyric opens:
Sing a song of joy,
Prayse our God with mirth:
His flocke who can destroy?
Is hee not Lord of heav'n and earth?
(p. 75)
The context of the poem in Campion's book, answering the Psalm of captivity which precedes it, clearly colours the address to God as a protector of his chosen people. It is quite unlike the opening of Psalm 104:
Praise the Lord, O my soul: O Lord my God, thou art become exceeding glorious; thou art clothed with majesty and honour.
In its tone it is far more like the Mosaic song of deliverance from Egypt (Exodus, 15: 1-20), and verbally much closer to the beginnings of Psalms 95, 96 and 98. The details of the Lord's power in stanzas three to five of the lyric also owe their detail to more than the single source of Psalm 104. The third stanza runs:
First who taught the day
From the East to rise?
Whom doth the Sunne obey
When in the Seas his glory dyes?
The last two lines recall Psalm 104 v. 19:
He appointed the moon for certain seasons:
And the sun knoweth his going down.
The first two lines, however, may derive from Psalm 74 v. 17 (v. 16 in the AV) ‘thou hast prepared the light and the sun’. The opening of the next stanza is close to Ps. 147 v. 4 ‘He telleth the number of the stars’.
The point of this is not just to correct scholarly detail, but to show that this is not a poem aiming to re-present a well-known Biblical text, but rather to recall a general manner and matter common to many Psalms of praise.
But just as in the previous Psalm paraphrase there were details that marked the poet's attempt to give coherence and consistency of direction to his version, so here the note sounded in the opening stanza, of praise to the Lord for his protection of his people, is picked up and amplified in the fifth stanza:
Angels round attend,
Wayting on his will;
Arm'd millions he doth send
To ayde the good or plague the ill.
Perhaps it was the fourth verse of Psalm 104 which provided the starting point for this stanza. It reads: ‘He maketh his angels spirits: and his ministers a flaming fire’. The reader of this Psalm in the Geneva Bible is directed to a concordance in the New Testament, Hebrews 1: 14. ‘Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?’ Calvin's commentaries cite two other parallel texts, Psalm 34: 7, and Psalm 91: 11. So this stanza, like the earlier part of the lyric, is a composite of a number of scriptural texts. This has two major implications for the reader. First, by recalling a New Testament text, the applicability of a Jewish Psalm to the Christian church is made explicit. Secondly, the poem, in its synthesis of scriptural echoes, does not so much imitate an original as reenact the way a Christian should read his Bible, marking the similarities between dispersed texts that are the sign of the hand of God at work in its composition.19
Because of the special status of the Bible there is no question in these poems, or in any of others in The First Booke bearing a heavy scriptural imprint, of the poet ‘overgoing his original. He may define himself, his thoughts and feelings, in relation to the Biblical material, but for him and his readers there is no doubt that the imitation stands in a subservient relationship.
The same is not the case when a poet imitates classical models. For all the authority of the ancients, for all the modesty that Renaissance writers were likely to feel about their own abilities or about the capabilities of their language, a poet was not inhibited from sporting with an original in a way that would have been unthinkable in the case of scripture.
A poem with a clear and direct relationship to a classical original is ‘If any hath the heart to kill’ from The Fourth Booke. This narrative of an unfortunate case of impotence is based on Ovid, Amores III.6. Since the Elegies were well-known, we may assume that many of Campion's readers would have recognised the source.
The lyric is one of the ‘vaine Ditties’ which Campion tells his more squeamish readers they may ignore if they wish.
If any hath the heart to kill,
Come rid me of this wofull paine.
For while I live I suffer still
This cruell torment all in vaine:
Yet none alive but one can guess
What is the cause of my distresse.
Thanks be to heav'n no grievous smart,
No maladies my limbes annoy;
I beare a sound and sprightfull heart,
Yet live I quite depriv'd of joy:
Since what I had, in vaine I crave,
And what I had not, now I have.
A Love I had, so fayre, so sweet,
As ever wanton eye did see.
Once by appointment wee did meete;
Shee would, but ah, it would not be:
She gave her heart, her hand shee gave;
All did I give, shee nought could have.
What Hagge did then my powers forspeake,
That never yet such taint did feele?
Now shee rejects me as one weake,
Yet am I all compos'd of steele.
Ah, this is it my heart doth grieve:
Now though shee sees, shee'le not believe!
(p. 189)
All the details of the last two stanzas are taken from Ovid: the willing lady, the suspicion of witchcraft, and the belated return of capability. But where Ovid's poem is an explicit eighty-nine line story, Campion's lyric poem of only twenty-four lines compresses all its narrative detail into the last twelve. These are the facts, but the question is how they affect our response to a poem perfectly self-sufficient, and wittily successful.
At the very lowest level any correspondence self-consciously made between one work and another invites the reader who discerns it to indulge in self-congratulation, and in his election to an élite company of knowledgeable readers. It may not be the most important of literary responses, but it is a legitimate and deep-seated source of pleasure.
At another level, recognition of the source enables the reader to flesh out the lyric's sparse narrative with his awareness of Ovid's much more specific and luxuriant detail. So, for example, the poet's statement in line 20 of the uniqueness of his failure, conjures up the memory of Ovid's much more expansive boast:
Yet boarded I the golden Chie twice,
And Libas, and the white cheeked Pitho thrice.
Corinna craved it in a summer's night,
And nine sweet bouts we had before daylight.(20)
More significant still is the way the lyric's structure turns the moment when the reader recognizes its source into a constituent in his understanding of, and response to its meaning. The opening two stanzas are couched in conventional Petrarchan idiom, and the reader at first understands them, because of the pressure of that relationship, as deriving from a situation of disappointed love. The Ovidian narrative of the last two stanzas then revises the reader's first answer to the riddle of lines 11-12.
The reader, therefore, is faced with a poem whose underlying situation is recreated as the work proceeds. He imagines first a lover frustrated by a heartless mistress, but then realises that the opening stanzas' evasiveness signals the poet's reluctance to speak openly of his humiliation. The first stage is couched in Petrarchan generalities, the second signalled by Ovidian explicitness. But even then the reader recognises that the retold story is less explicit, less detailed than the source, and, in its condensation of the original, apt to the poet's general unwillingness to make his impotence public.
Looked at as a literary construct, however, the poem is assured in its organisation. It sets the reader a riddle, and a riddle implies that the poet knows the answer and is delighting in teasing his audience. There is, in other words, a tension between the narrative ‘I’ of the poem, insecure, humiliated and evasive, and the poet, secure in his manipulation of his texts. The paradox is explicit in the conclusion of the first stanza, where the couplet both expresses a sense of relief that only the lover's mistress knows of his failure and at the same time invites the reader to ‘guess’ what the source of his misery is. By making the story public the lyric undermines the truth of its own statement.
In this context, the literariness of the poem takes on added significance. Its goal, the answer to its puzzle, is a literary text. That text represents a way of talking about love that stands in direct opposition to the Petrarchan, good-mannered evasiveness with which the poem opens. So the lyric is, to a large extent, a poem about ways of writing love poetry, exposing the inadequacies of one code by juxtaposing it with another. This layer of implication is only fully available to the reader who recognises its specific literary affiliation.
In short, this poem does not merely abbreviate Ovid's Elegy, it redirects it. For the reader the nature of that conversion becomes part of the play of the poem's meaning. In the case of a more famous lyric, the act of conversion is much more complex, as more than one source is brought into play.
My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,
And, though the sager sort our deedes reprove,
Let us not way them: heav'ns great lamps doe dive
Into their west, and strait againe revive,
But soone as once set is our little light,
Then must we sleepe one ever-during night.
If all would lead their lives in love like mee,
Then bloudie swords and armour should not be,
Nor drum nor trumpet peaceful sleepes should move,
Unless alar'me came from the campe of love:
But fooles do live, and wast their little light,
And seeke with paine their ever-during night.
When timely death my life and fortune ends,
Let not my hearse be vext with mourning friends,
But let all lovers, rich in triumph, come,
And with sweet pastimes grace my happie tombe;
And Lesbia, close up thou my little light,
And crowne with love my ever-during night.
(p. 18)
The first stanza is based on Catullus's best-known poem:
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis.
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
(Let us live, my Lesbia, and love, and value at one farthing all the talk of crabbed old men. Suns may set and rise again. For us, when the short light has once set, remains to be slept the sleep of one unbroken night.)21 The relationship of these two poems has been discussed frequently.22 The most significant modifications are three.
First, the potential critics are not ‘old’ but ‘sage’. The poem is not a contest between age and passionate youth, but between false and true wisdom. This modification is cemented in the poem by the last two lines of the second stanza, which retrospectively ‘justifies’ the initial adaptation of the original.
Second is the expansion of the image of the setting and rising sun. This, while not changing the ‘meaning’ of the original in its contrast of night's temporariness with the permanent end of life, does significantly alter the reader's response to that meaning. Where in Catullus the statement's matter-of-factness gives a sober urgency to the poet's persuasive aim, Campion's version seems so to celebrate the revolution of night and day, as it endows the ‘great lampes’ with active desire in the verb ‘dive’, that the positive attitude lingers in the reader's mind as powerfully as the negative alternative.
The third, and most obvious change, is that the second half of Catullus's poem, demanding innumerable kisses, is simply omitted. At the simplest level this means that the reader who knows the original is briefly surprised that the poem does not continue in the direction he anticipated. He then realises that this lyric is a kind of descant on its classical initiator, explicitly creative and meditative. But though the poem departs from the original, it returns in the refrain at the end of each stanza to the point where it abandoned Catullus. This means that formally the poem consists of three ways of arriving at a single, Catullan statement. ‘My sweetest Lesbia’ begins as a paraphrase of another poem, but ends as a three-fold exploration of a single image from it.
The matter of the stanzas which replace Catullus's continuation is itself derived from other classical originals. Davis, following Cunningham, points to the second stanza's dependance on Propertius II. 15, lines 41 and 43.23 But the contrast between the life of war, and the life of love's more agreeable battles is a common one in all the Latin love poets. R.O.A.M. Lyne collects many examples.24 Further-more it is a conceit thoroughly absorbed in Renaissance love poetry. The relationship between the poem and a particular source is therefore nowhere near so determined in this stanza as the first.
It is possible that the third stanza also owes something to two classical sources, Tibullus, I.i, lines 59-68, and the opening of Propertius II.xiii (A). But where Tibullus asks that his death should not be the signal for mourning because grief would wound his ghost, and where Propertius dismisses the panoply of mourning because his books are the only companion he desires, Campion asks instead that his funeral should be the occasion for a triumph of love.
The poem as a whole, then, is an example of that kind of imitation where sources are fully digested by the poet and become the basis of a new poem. ‘My sweetest Lesbia’ is sufficiently close to Catullus for its departures to be felt as part of its meaning, though its other classical references are much less significant. In other poems it scarcely matters that details may be traced back to a classical original.
A poem that nicely illustrates the point at which awareness of specific sources begins to merge with the less specific control exerted by generic expectation is ‘It fell on a sommers day’ (p. 31). This narrative of Jamy's seduction of Bessie in her feigned sleep fuses and recasts two classical sources, Propertius's description of his drunken return to a sleeping Cynthia (I.iii), and Ovid's Amores, I.vi where a sleeping man is disturbed by a woman. But these specific sources are not as significant to the reader's response as is the lyric's relationship to the whole genre of poems where a man approaches a sleeping lady. For the pleasure one takes in its humorous narrative is supplemented by the contrast between its plebeian participants and the mythological or aristocratic figures in other examples and by the way Bessie is merely pretending to the passive role that literary tradition ordains for the female participant. Perhaps the Ovidian source is significant here, for Bessie seems to take over from it a ‘male’ response—she delights in sex. Taken as a whole the poem is mildly and humorously subversive in its view of female lustiness. The subversiveness is not merely a matter of what the poem says, but is enacted and engendered in the reader by its subversive relationship to the genre in which he places it.
The control exerted on a reader by generic relationships of subject matter is, of course, much less precise than that sparked by recognition of an imitative relationship between a poem and a single ascertainable source. What is provided, for poet and reader, is a kind of narrative ‘core’ which makes easy the construction of a lyric's basic situation. What then matters is how creatively the poem descants upon its cantus firmus.
Two poems derived from a conventional situation related to that of ‘It fell on a sommers day’, where a lover contemplates his sleeping lady, make convenient examples of some of the different ways a single topos may be exploited.
The first is:
Sleepe, angry beauty, sleep, and feare not me,
For who a sleeping Lyon dares provoke?
It shall suffice me here to sit and see
Those lips shut up that never kindely spoke.
What sight can more content a lovers minde
That beauty seeming harmlesse, if not kinde?
My words have charm'd her, for secure shee sleepes,
Though guilty much of wrong done to my love;
And in her slumber, see! shee close-ey'd weepes!
Dreames often more then waking passions move.
Pleade, sleepe, my cause, and make her soft like thee,
That shee in peace may wake and pitty mee.
(p. 161)
The subtlety of this enchanting lyric derives from its playful exploitation of a conventional poetic situation on a number of levels. In the first stanza the poet establishes an attitude to his beloved by distinguishing himself from figures such as Astrophil,25 or the speaker of Pilkington's song ‘Now peep, boe peep’,26 or Jamy in ‘It fell on a sommers day’. For the reader can only understand the significance of the injunction not to ‘feare’ in the first line, or the statement ‘it shall suffice me’ in the third, if he realises they imply that this speaker, unlike others in a similar situation, intends to make no amorous advances.
The poet adopts a slightly self-mocking tone, as he timidly refuses to do what the convention expects him to do, and this is maintained in his passive hope that sleep will do for him what he cannot do for himself—persuade the mistress to kindness. Our sense of the lyric's self-awareness, however, derives also from the way the poem's development causes the reader to revise his initial formulation of the situation to which it may be construed as a response.
At first it seems as if the poet is addressing an already sleeping lady. This is the situation that literary convention would persuade the reader to construct, and it is reinforced by the particularity of the third line, where the adverb ‘here’ nicely solidifies the picture. The imperatives of the opening line are understood as meaning ‘sleep on now’, partly at least because in ‘real life’ one does not often order anyone to sleep.
The opening words of the second stanza, however, demand a recasting of this interpretation. If his ‘words have charm'd her’, then the imperatives must in fact have been giving instructions, and the lyric therefore does have a narrative development. The lady passes from wakefulness to sleep, then to weeping. Again in this stanza there is a particularity that enforces on the reader a sense of the poem's situation. The matter of fact opening line, and the exhortation of the third both work to make a poetically conventional situation seem vivid.
The process of reading is not, however, quite so simply one of discarding a provisional construction in favour of another which seems to fit better. For the initial impression remains present in the mind, the elements that persuaded the reader that it was not actually giving present-tense orders to a lady still stand. What happens is rather that a reader faced with the difficulty of reconciling the two stanzas moves towards another possibility—that the narrative happens in the mind of the poet, rather than in the reality it seems at first to be reporting.
In this light the line ‘my words have charm'd her’ assumes extra significance, for it draws attention to the literariness of the preceding stanza, and to the persuasive, quasi-magical nature of its content. We then understand that, at least in part, the vividly presented narrative situation of the opening is a picture drawn in the poet's imagination. It is not so much a statement of ‘this is what is’ as of ‘I wish this might be so’.
One way of looking at this poem, then, is to regard it as that fashionable object, a literary fiction which draws explicit attention to its fictional status, undermining the ‘realism’ it seems on the surface to be offering to the reader. No doubt this is part of the truth, as it is of all literature that challenges its audience. But at the same time the poem stands as a convincing picture of the way the human mind tries to persuade itself by imagining a desired object with sufficient solidity to make it seem truly present, and therefore truly obtainable.
Part of this effort of self-persuasion is evidenced in the lyric's gradual shift of address. It opens with speech directed to the lady as the object of the speaker's love, then moves through a report of the poet's actions, embraces the audience of the poem as they are addressed in the imperative ‘see’ of line nine, and finally ends with the most obviously literary speech of all, an apostrophe to sleep. This pattern emphasises the rhetorical, persuasive character of the lyric. At the same time its shift towards increasingly abstract and literary objects of address mimics the process through which our sense of the reality of the poem's situation is undermined.
This lyric is delightfully elusive. Though underpinned by convention, it manipulates the reader's pre-set knowledge of its literary stereotype in a subtle, dislocatory fashion so that what seems on one level to be revivification of a standard topos by the application of solidifying detail and by an initial distancing of himself from the convention on the part of the speaker, turns into a witty example of the way a man trapped in one conventional situation (of frustrated love) tries to work himself out of it by imagining another (of addressing his sleeping lady).
The second lyric makes a nice contrast with ‘Sleepe, angry beauty’ in several ways.
Awake, thou spring of speaking grace, mute rest becomes not thee;
The fayrest women, while they sleepe, and Pictures equall bee.
O come and dwell in loves discourses,
Old renuing, new creating.
The words which thy rich tongue discourses
Are not of the common rating.
Thy voyce is as an Eccho cleare which Musicke doth beget,
Thy speech is as an Oracle which none can counterfeit:
For thou alone, without offending,
Hast obtain'd power of enchanting;
And I could heare thee without ending,
Other comfort never wanting.
Some little reason brutish lives with humane glory share;
But language is our proper grace, from which they sever'd are.
As brutes in reason man surpasses,
Men in speech excell each other:
If speech be then the best of graces.
Doe it not in slumber smother.
(p. 148)
The basic situation of this lyric is the same as that of the preceding poem, but where ‘Sleepe angry beauty’ used it to give a poem of pleading a quasi-narrative direction, here it acts as no more than a frame for a lyric that combines a little standard philosophy with another lyric type, the praise of a lady. At the simplest level the poem animates the conventions it employs precisely through the device of combining topoi of address and of situation, so that a not untypical celebration of a lady's voice is given a dramatic context, and solidified by being embedded in a quasi-logical argument.
This is not the only way that manipulation of a standard situation contributes to the reader's response, for the lyric generates some of its exuberance through control and qualification of deep-seated resonances attached to its conventional situation.
The picture of two figures, one sleeping, the other awake, was popular in the poetry and prose fiction of the period because the narrative opposition it offers could so readily be assimilated to the largerscale codes of love poetry. To explore fully the range of associations of the opposition of sleep and wakefulness would be a disproportionate indulgence, but some of the patterns more obviously relevant to these poems may be singled out.
Sleep is ‘death's second self’, and opposed therefore to life's vitality. The coldness of death and warmth of light are easily assimilated to the stereotype of cold chastity opposed to fiery passion, female to male. This is the pattern reflected in ‘Harke, al you ladies’, which opens:
Harke, al you ladies that do sleep:
the fayry queen Proserpina
Bids you awake and pitie them that weep.
(p. 44)
In this scheme a woman's sleeping is a metaphor for her heartless neglect of her lover.
But sleep is also a ‘care-charmer’, and is then opposed to the toils of waking existence. This polarity surfaces most frequently in an individual lover's complaint at his own inability to sleep, as in ‘The Sypres curten of the night is spread’ (p. 32), but it figures also in lyrics based on the opposition of sleeping and waking figures, as, for example, ‘Sleep wayward thoughts’ from Dowland's First Book.27 In this scheme the valorization of the two terms is reversed—sleep is desired, wakefulness lamented.
The attraction of narratives such as ‘It fell on a sommers day’ lies in the way a dramatic situation plays with these associations. The chastity of the lady is figured in her sleeping, but narratively sleep renders her a quiescent and available victim, where awake she is antagonistic and tyrannical. The piquancy of the first stanza of ‘Sleepe, angry beauty’ derives from its explicit denial of this potential, and its exploitation instead of the possibility that the positive power of sleep will itself dismantle the lady's coldness.
In the case of ‘Awake, thou spring’, the reader's sense of the poem's sunniness derives in part from its vigorous espousing of all the positive associations of the situation. The mistress is bidden to awake, to enter into the living world of love. Moreover, where in ‘Sleepe, angry beauty’ the lady's sleep had come as a respite for the lover from her unkind speech, in this poem he begs her to ‘dwell in love's discourses’. At the same time a potential negative association is explicitly denied. For the lady's sleep is not an image of her habitual indifference to her lover (as it is in ‘Harke, al you ladies’), but a temporary cessation of her usual delightful speech. In the context of the associations potentially available to poet and reader once the situation of sleeping lady-wakeful lover is broached, ‘Awake, thou spring’ defines itself by allowing no room for any negative associations to emerge.
The ‘tonal complexity’ which Davis sees as Campion's characteristic strength is in no small measure attributable to the flexibility with which he combines different generic conventions and manipulates the ‘pre-packed’ resonances that each brings with it.
One further set of poems may be considered to demonstrate this characteristic artfulness. The itemised description of a lady known as a ‘blazon’ is endemic in medieval and Renaissance poetry. Its conventional procedure is to begin at the head and work down the body, with many traditional images associated with each anatomical feature. In three lyrics Campion explores the convention creatively.
Perhaps the best-known is this one:
There is a Garden in her face,
Where Roses and white Lillies grow;
A heav'nly paradice is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits doe flow.
There Cherries grow, which none may buy
Till Cherry ripe themselves doe cry.
Those Cherries fayrely doe enclose
Of Orient Pearle a double row,
Which when her lovely laughter showes,
They looke like Rose-buds fill'd with snow.
Yet them nor Peere nor Prince can buy,
Till Cherry ripe themselves doe cry.
Her Eyes like Angels watch them still;
Her Browes like bended bowes doe stand,
Threatning with piercing frownes to kill
All that attempt with eye or hand
Those sacred Cherries to come nigh,
Till Cherry ripe themselves doe cry.
(p. 174)
The conventionality of imagery in this lyric is obvious. Indeed its predictability is emphasised by the way the first two stanzas do not even name the objects of the similes—skin, cheeks, lips and teeth. The reader knows what is meant as he supplies the sense from his memory of innumerable other examples. The delicacy and delightfulness of this poem derives instead from its variation on the standard aim of a blazon—to praise a lady, supplying instead a more active and dramatic valuation of the nature of the woman described.
In the first stanza the reader receives a warm impression of the lady. The slightly odd fourth line, with its unusual verb, ‘flow’ fits the lubricious picture that the reader may readily construct with the appetitive associations of ‘fruit’ to aid him. This reading is endorsed when the refrain's ostensible setback to lusty imagining is overridden by the rapid resumption of the conventional image of lips as kissable cherries at the beginning of the second stanza. But the promise is shortlived. As the stanza moves towards its refrain the lady's choosiness becomes clearer. In place of an indeterminate ‘none may buy’ comes a more exclusive ‘nor Peere nor Prince may buy’. The lady has become much less accessible. In the third stanza this distancing is completed, as we realise that she not only has the power to deny access to her ‘cherries’, but is temperamentally likely to use it. The cherries have become ‘sacred’, subsumed by that word into the divinely appointed charge of the Hesperides, and therefore unlikely ever to come to the touch of the poet or his readers. The finality of this last stanza is signalled to the reader by the sudden appearance of the lady herself in the poem—her eyes and brows have a physical presence by being named that the features earlier gestured to merely through their conventional substitutes did not.
In this lyric, then, the reader sees a lady delightedly and lustfully contemplated turn into a tyrant, and takes pleasure in this manipulation of a standard poetic subject. The refrain itself, which seemed at first promisingly ‘earthy’ (in Davis's term) with its associations with the market-place, ends up as a demonstration of the lady's Petrarchan disdain.28
The next two poems to be considered are rather more straightforward variations on standard procedures. ‘Mistris, since you so much desire’ begins by reversing the direction of conventional description, moving from breast up to lips, cheeks and eyes. The aim of the lyric seems at first to be to answer the mistress's implied question ‘where is Cupid's fire?’, but the upward movement of the catalogue of her beauties does not end, as we might expect, with the location of the deity in her ‘starrie pearcing eyes’, for the poet continues:
Those eyes I strive not to enjoy,
For they have power to destroy;
Nor woe I for a smile, or kisse,
So meanely triumph's not my blisse;
But a little higher, but a little higher,
I climbe to crowne my chast desire.
(p. 41)
The poet's protestation of his desire for the beauty of mind of his mistress is, of course, the standard talk of neo-Platonism lightly touched. It works wittily into the poem primarily because it is presented as a dimension supplied by the male speaker rather than, as would be more usual, being demanded by the lady. In the conventional context of love poetry the mistress might have asked her question for a variety of motives, but we must imagine her to have been surprised by the upward continuation of the catalogue that, in one way, denies the significance of the very praise that the first part of the poem offers. This indeed is why the poem succeeds in bringing its conventionality to life. For on one level the poetry of physical praise is opposed to the spiritual aspiration of neo-Platonic love. At another, their juxtaposition means that a poem which begins as praise of the loved object turns into a poem of self-congratulation on the part of the poet. It is this activity prompted in the reader's understanding that makes even a fairly slight lyric delightful.
In The Fourth Booke Campion rewrote this poem:
Beauty, since you so much desire
To know the place of Cupids fire:
About you somewhere doth it rest,
Yet never harbour'd in your brest,
Nor gout-like in your heele or toe;
What foole would seeke Loves flame so low?
But a little higher, but a little higher,
There, there, o there lyes Cupids fire.
Think not, when Cupid most you scorne,
Men judge that you of Ice were borne;
For, though you cast love at your heele,
His fury yet sometime you feele;
And where-abouts if you would know,
I tell you still, not in your toe:
But a little higher, but a little higher,
There, there, o there lyes Cupids fire.
(p. 190)
In this version the blazon element is much suppressed, but still has some part to play in generating and defining the reader's response. For in locating Cupid's fire in the female pudenda Campion is doing more than earth the aspiration of his own earlier poem. He is taking on that part of the blazon tradition which (in England at least) dictated a modest hop from belly to thighs. Pyrocles, in Sidney's Arcadia, laments this necessity as he enumerates Philoclea's beauties.
Loth, I must leave his [Cupid's] chief resort,
For such a use the world hath gotten,
The best things still must be forgotten.(29)
Donne, in ‘Love's Progress’ (a poem that Campion may have had in mind when composing this lyric), banishes Cupid entirely, but asserts:
Although we see celestial bodies move
Above the earth, the earth we till and love:
So we her airs contemplate, words and heart,
And virtues; but we love the centric part.(30)
There was, then, precedent for Campion's drawing attention to forbidden territory. But the sense of vulgar realism that the poem gives to the reader yet derives in no small measure from its repudiation of the dominant tradition.
The wit of the poem lies in the way this denial is reinforced by the second stanza's direction to the woman with the implication that, contrary to all Petrarchan habit, she too feels sexual desire. It is the suggestion that the poet sees through female pretence that gives added force to the poem's denial of blazon convention. The lyric mounts a frontal assault on the tradition, denying the attitudes it enshrines by pointing to the truth of the desire it conventionally figures, but evades.
In each of these three poems, then, Campion manifests a fertile activity in his manipulation of a single literary convention. Wherever one might wish finally to place him in the poetical league tables, it is rarely that he can be accused of that vice most characteristic of the truly minor poet—complacency in the conventions he employs.
A poem which finely illustrates Campion's dexterity in manipulating the reader's response through the recollection both of specific texts and of generic convention is ‘When thou must home’:
When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there ariv'd, a newe admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do ingirt thee round,
White Iope, blith Hellen, and the rest,
To heare the stories of thy finisht love,
From that smoothe tongue whose musicke hell can move:
Then wilt thou speake of banqueting delights,
Of masks and revels which sweete youth did make,
Of Turnies and great challenges of knights,
And all these triumphes for thy beauties sake:
When thou hast told these honours done to thee,
Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murther me.
(p. 46)
The piquancy of this exquisite lyric is derived in no small measure from the sudden reversal brought about in the last line. In order that a surprise ending may work upon the reader he must feel both a shock of astonishment and yet, at the same time, a recognition of appropriateness. If the first were not successfully engineered then the poem would fall flat, but if the second quality were not also present, the reversal would seem merely adventitious.
Campion ensures this double effect in a number of complementary ways. Basically, as in other lyrics we have considered, the reader is forced into making a revision of his reading. At first he takes it as a poem of praise, where the inevitable mortality of a mistress is softened by the adulatory audience of classical beauties, and by the recollection of her own previous triumphs. This celebration is carefully engineered as the indirect compliment of the first stanza shifts into the more emphatic tribute of the second, where the honours recalled by the lady are arranged in ascending order of magnitude, topped by the appropriately summary ‘triumphs’ of line ten. The two stanzas are neatly interconnected, the first depicting an audience waiting to hear the narratives that the second supplies. They hinge upon the suppressed tribute of the sixth line, which compares the lady's voice to the legendary Orpheus. Thus far the poem suggests a traditionally adoring posture on the part of the poet, a suggestion reinforced if the reader recollects the Propertian text which underlies the first stanza:
Haec tua, Persephone, maneat clementia, nec tu,
Persephone coniunx, saevior esse velis.
Sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum:
pulchra sit in superis, si licet, una locis.
Vobiscum est Iope, vobiscum candida Tyro,
vobiscum Europa nec proba Pasiphae
et quot Troia tulit vetus et quot Achaia formas, …
(Persephone, may thy mercy endure, nor mayest thou, that hast Persephone for spouse, be over-cruel. There are so many thousand beauties among the dead; let one fair one, if so it may be, abide on earth. With you is Iope, with you snowy Tyro, with you Europa and impious Pasiphae, and all the beauties that Troy and Achaea bore of old …)31
It is not perhaps crucial to the poem's effect that this specific text be known to the reader, but yet, if it is recalled then the differences between them assume some significance. Where Propertius pleads for the soul of his beloved to be left on earth, Campion acknowledges the inevitable, though making every effort to ameliorate its harshness, thus reinforcing the feeling that he is attempting to convert a potentially sad subject into an occasion for celebration.
The opening of Propertius's poem, however, cements a connection between ‘When thou must home’ and the poem that precedes it in A Booke of Ayres, ‘Harke, al you ladies’, which had been concerned with ‘The fairie queen Proserpina’. In the first instance the relationship of these two lyrics seems primarily to point up the dissimilarity between them, and thereby to reinforce the ‘optimistic’ reading of ‘When thou must home’. The last stanza of ‘Harke, al you ladies’ runs:
All you that love, or lov'd before,
the Fairie Queene Proserpina
Bids you encrease that loving humour more:
they that yet have not fed
On delight amorous,
she vowes that they shall lead
Apes in Avernus.
(p. 44)
Here it is old maids who are consigned to Proserpina's other kingdom, and the reader proceeding to the next lyric, though teased by the obvious connection between them, quickly decides that the lady of ‘When thou must home’, with her stories of ‘finisht love’, stringing along a train of classical beauties, does not belong with the tormented virgins.
Until the twelfth line of the lyric, then, the reader is persuaded directly and indirectly to construe the poem one way. With the surprise of that last line he is suddenly forced to view it entirely differently. It becomes, as Rosemond Tuve puts it, ‘a perception, subtle and only half-smiling, of the general ironic discrepancy between Beauty's triumphs and Beauty's proud cruelty’.32 It is the understanding of the poet's relationship to his lady that is most significantly revised, and, as a consequence, the reader looks back over the poem and constructs a second reading. The subtlety of the poem is that its various elements are capable of sustaining both readings. The change of direction is thereby made both surprising and satisfying.
The euphemism of the first stanza, at first understood as part of the poem's strategy of praise, comes to seem disquieting. For how can anyone be but a ‘guest’ in their own home? So too, Helen's blitheness cannot, now, override our knowledge of her dubious morality. The sly associations of the epithet ‘smoothe’ take over from the merely mellifluous meaning at first attributed to it, and the disproportion of attributing Orphic power to a voice engaged only in female gossip surfaces to enforce the suggestion that it is only the lady's vanity that can hope that she, like Orpheus, will be but a temporary ‘guest’ in her long home.
In the second stanza the poet's urgent and ironic plea that the lady will tell of her conduct towards him highlights the boastfulness of the narratives she has been prepared to offer, and makes us aware, as we were not on the first reading, where the tributes offered to her seemed to suit with an intention to praise, of the fact that she has only ever received, and never given.
Once this ‘new’ poem has been made, then its relationship with ‘Harke, al you ladies’ is also revised. For in that poem it was comfortingly assumed that amiable ladies were rewarded with beauty, and only those who were indifferent to their lovers were tormented and ultimately consigned to hell. In ‘When thou must home’ it is disconcertingly recognised that though this lady is equally heartless and also bound for Hell, it is not she who suffers for her cruelty. What the poems share, the reader now understands, is a male desire for vengeance on icy and unresponsive women.
The relationship between the two poems is therefore significant for the enriching of implication it engenders, but the most important literary relationship of all is that which subsists between ‘When thou must home’ and a characteristic sonnet theme. In countless sonnets poets remind their ladies of the inevitable approach of decay and death. As Campion's poem begins, that whole tradition is recalled. As it proceeds it differentiates itself from the usual development of the topos. On first reading this difference seems to consist of an absence of any note of fear or warning. The lyric, therefore, establishes its apparently comforting note partly through this modification. The ending, however, generates a more complicated dialogue with characteristic sonnet treatment of the theme. For where most sonnets set against encroaching decay either encouragement to present loving action or else a promise that in the poet's praise the lady (or young man in Shakespeare's Sonnets) will be rendered eternal and inviolate, Campion's lyric vengefully records his mistress's obduracy, and clearly wishes all the torment of hell to punish her.
The relationship of this poem to the sonnet is not a matter only of theme, for in its structure too it reads like a variation upon sonnet form. The two stanzas are related by a ‘when-then’ pattern, and this is repeated in the pattern of the last two lines, giving them the feel of a sonnet's concluding couplet. Once the reader perceives this relationship two things follow. First, the repetition of the ‘when-then’ pattern integrates the final two lines firmly with the lyric they conclude. This means that the surprise effect is made more forceful, but also that the reader does not feel it comes out of nowhere. Secondly, though he is cheated of the summary function the couplet at first seems likely to perform, there is sufficient precedent in the sonnet form generally, and specifically in sonnets on the theme of decay for a change of direction in the final couplet, for him to feel that this lyric conforms to his formal expectations, however surprising it might be in its meaning and implication.
In short, this masterly lyric uses all its resources to achieve ‘a combination of surprise and fulfilment that gives the last phrase its wit and the poem its point’.33 That comment was made by Barbara Smith, not about Campion's poem, but about a modern epigram. Its appropriateness demonstrates how ‘When thou must home’, in addition to descanting on texts and conventional thematic material, also brings into play resonances that derive from a less specific cross-fertilisation of the lyric by other genres—sonnet and epigram.
The mixing of kinds, as Rosalie Colie has pointed out in The Resources of Kind, was particularly fruitful in the Renaissance. She directs attention, in passages of particular relevance here, to the mingling of epigram and sonnet, and ‘the poet's capacity to enliven generic styles, to animate, confront and intertwine lyric and epigrammatic styles’.34 ‘When thou must home’ can be seen as combining the characteristic poses of sonnet and epigram in a single lyric, for, as she writes, ‘one would expect that of a loving lover the poet properly writes sonnets, of an unloving lover epigrams’,35 and it is precisely the revision of one view of the lady into the other that, as we have seen, complicates and enriches the reader's response to that poem.
Of Campion's interest in the epigram as a genre there can be no doubt. In his publications of Latin verse at the beginning and the end of his career there are hundreds of epigrams. Furthermore he wrote, in the preface to A Booke of Ayres: ‘What Epigrams are in Poetrie, the same are Ayres in musicke, then in their chief perfection when they are short and well seasoned’, and ‘as Martiall speaks in defence of his short Epigram, so may I say in th'apologie of Ayres, that where there is full volume, there can be no imputation of shortness’. (p. 15)
In seeking to demonstrate the effect and consequence of the importation of epigram into lyric we have immediately to confront the elusive nature of generic description. For two different streams, one Roman, the other Greek, fed into the Renaissance poet's sense of what constituted epigrams, and meant that a wide range of possibilities could be included under the title.36 Nonetheless it is possible to establish certain features central to the genre. Briefly these might be characterised as brevity and pointedness; a fondness for aphorism and sententia; a detached and public posture on the part of the poet; and, finally, a tendency to see the plainness of epigrammatic style and sharpness of attitude as particularly appropriate to certain kinds of subject matter.
The pithy pointedness of epigram means that it is ‘a pre-eminently teleological poem, and in a sense a suicidal one, for all of its energy is directed towards its own termination’.37 In more recent times it has usually been felt that this urgently desired ending should involve some witty reversal of expectation, but, as Hudson demonstrates, this was not necessarily so. ‘For the point of an epigram … does not always depend upon a turn of thought: the thought may go straight forward, and the point may be merely an emphatic summary of what has already been presented, or a distillation from it’.38 In poems of this sort, aphorism, sentence or proverb are frequently found to serve particularly well. ‘When thou must home’ does exemplify an epigrammatic conclusion involving a ‘turn of thought’, but it is not in fact very characteristic of Campion's lyrics of an epigrammatic cast, most of which are closer to Hudson's alternative pattern.
The importance of endings to epigrams predicates a certain kind of structuring of material. Barbara Smith refines upon Lessing's often quoted description of the two-part structure of epigram, suggesting that
We may think of the characteristic structure of the epigram … as a thematic sequence which reaches a point of maximal instability and then turns to the business of completing itself.39
Such sharpening of a poem's direction by building continuously towards a pointed conclusion is a very useful means of overcoming the ‘special problem of strophic verse intended for musical rendition … that the repetitive structure which is most effective with respect to musical demands is least effective with respect to closure’.40 It is perhaps in this respect that the example of the epigram was formally most useful to Campion, overriding the potential fragmentation of stanzaic lyrics sung to repeated music. (I do not here imply that it was the only way of coping with the situation—other responses to the difficulty and equally successful solutions will figure in a later chapter).
A convenient example of the way these features of epigram are translated into lyric form is supplied by ‘It fell on a sommers day’, for Campion also wrote two epigrams on the same subject.41
The lyric and longer epigram share the same ending (the seduced lady's determination to sleep every afternoon in the hope of more such experiences). In the epigram, however, the conclusion is sprung upon the reader with little preparation. Its narrative concentrates exclusively on the male actor, and gives no sense of the girl's conspiracy in her own seduction. It is, indeed, the reader's sudden realisation of her complacence that is the ‘point’ of the epigram. In the lyric, by contrast, the reader is aware throughout of both participants, and therefore of irony at the expense of Jamy's inflated sense of his own daring as Bessy wilfully pretends quiescence. The ending clarifies and focusses implications wittily and ambiguously suggested in the course of the narrative and fixes the reader's stance towards the poem as a whole.
The shapeliness of many other lyrics is ensured by aphoristic conclusion. ‘So tyr'd are all my thoughts’ sets up a series of questions answered in the final stanza; ‘So many loves have I neglected’, ‘Beauty is but a painted hell’ and ‘Thus I resolve’ are straightforward examples. In all of them a solid, forward-directed form is generated and assured by an ending that, in Hudson's earlier-quoted phrase, acts as a ‘distillation from’ the matter of the poem.
The influence of epigram is also to be found in lyrics where the stanza-form is reinforced, rather than subordinated to a larger design. ‘Could my heart’, for example, is made up of three stanzas each of which offer self-contained epigrammatic statements arranged as thesis, antithesis and conclusion. ‘I must complain’ combines material divided into two epigrams in Epigrammatum Liber II, its two stanzas related by question and answer. ‘Thou art not faire’ has a similar structure, though it is much less successful.
More significant is the kind of double perspective the linking of genres makes possible. By it our arrival at a sententia as the goal of a lyric's striving suggests that for the poem's speaker security is to be found when the private dilemmas of a lyrical world of love can be placed and fixed by reference to the public wisdom that aphorism encodes. Rosemond Tuve long ago pointed out that Renaissance poems frequently seek to generalise, rather than simply to express a state of mind.42
The fiction of the lyric mode is, even in the Renaissance, primarily an individual and introspective one. Astrophil, in Sidney's sequence, writes to ‘paint the blackest face of woe’ but also ‘to ease a troubled mind’. The epigram, however, is a public mode, and its writer ‘holds the reader at a distance, addressing him directly, but not inviting him to share experiences’. Where the writer of lyric mimes the fluctuation of thought and feeling, the epigrammatist ‘writes a poem not when he is moved, but when he ceases to be. He records the moment of mastery—not the emotion, but the attitude that conquered it’.43 This last comment is a particularly useful one in describing the effect of ‘So tyr'd are all my thoughts’. Its first three stanzas do seem to record a present state, made urgent by rhetorical question and apostrophe. If the poem ended at its twelfth line it would belong with numberless lyrics representing a disconsolate poet. With the last stanza all this is pushed back in time and space, placed under a perspective of later wisdom that imparts a touch of retrospective irony to our picture of the somewhat self-indulgent figure of the first three stanzas.
The vital point to recognise here is that the epigrammatic mode is used by Campion with the same purpose as his variation upon conventional themes or classical source texts; to test and explore standard literary formulations of experience. But it must also be recognised that the roles may be reversed, and that the proud arrogance that the epigram's style generates through its assumption of wisdom can also be tested and found wanting.
Proverbial statement is mocked in ‘A secret love or two’, where the libertine female marshals any amount of public wisdom to justify her conduct. In poems such as ‘Kinde are her answers’ or ‘Faine would I my love disclose’ the reader feels that the poet reaches for the comfort of sententiae that signally fail to be adequate to his distress. Elsewhere epigrammatic conclusions are offered with a conscious irony, exposing their limitedness as prescriptions for living. ‘Vaine men whose follies’ and ‘If love loves truth’ are poems of this kind.
Aphorism is particularly suitable to epigram since by its nature it suggests agreed, public truth. Bacon's observations on aphoristic writing are of interest here.
But the writing in Aphorisms hath many excellent virtues, … For first, it trieth the writer, whether he be superficial or solid: for Aphorisms, except they should be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith and heart of sciences; for discourse of illustration is cut off: recitals of examples are cut off; discourse of connection and order is cut off; descriptions of practice are cut off. So there remaineth nothing to fill the Aphorisms but some good quantity of observation: and therefore no man can suffice, nor in reason will attempt to write Aphorisms, but he that is sound and grounded.
He suggests the effect of aphoristic writing on the reader:
Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther.44
In the lyric poem aphorism functions very much as Bacon suggests, producing a lapidary effect as sentence is laid upon sentence, giving weight to the poet's utterance and inviting the reader to supply the connections, illustrations and situations that will fill out the experience of which he assumes they are a distillation. Frequently this leads to a paradoxical result—that language seeming weighty and full of compressed matter yet makes up a poem elusive and enigmatic.
Two examples may serve to illustrate this side of Campion's poetic personality. The first comes from his book of religious lyrics.
Where are all thy beauties now, all harts enchayning?
Wither are thy flatt'rers gone with all their fayning?
All fled; and thou alone still here remayning.
Thy rich state of twisted gold to Bayes is turned;
Cold as thou art, are thy loves that so much burned:
Who dye in flatt'rers armes are seldome mourned.
Yet, in spight of envie, this be still proclaymed,
That none worthyer then thy selfe thy worth hath blamed:
When their poore names are lost, thou shalt live famed.
When thy story, long time hence, shall be perused,
Let the blemish of thy rule be thus excused:
None ever liv'd more just, none more abused.
(p. 61)
This lyric has a sombre power, deriving in no small measure from the way simple language issues a string of summary pronouncements, mainly coincident with single line-units. Its structure is balanced, as two stanzas of dispraise are followed by two qualifying and ameliorating their severity. The reader's problem is to translate this general response into a more particular picture.
The opening lines of the poem suggest that the addressee is a conventional sonneteer's lady grown old; the flatterers, then, are taken as being those poets who have written emptily in her praise. One could imagine this beginning turning into one of Drayton's harsher sonnets. The fourth line, however, implies that the poet is speaking to a royal figure, an idea which then suggests a rather different understanding of the ‘flatt'rers’ of the sixth line. Matters are made more difficult by the apparent contradiction between the endings of these two stanzas. In the first we assume that the lady is solitary, but alive. In the second the word ‘dye’ is ambiguous; it might be fact, or merely prophecy. In turn this raises questions about the word ‘cold’ in the fifth line—is it the cold of heartlessness, or is it the lasting chill of death? In the rest of the lyric such problems are compounded, and we are left uncertain as to the ‘story’ that the envious might tell, and unsure whether the poem as a whole is more about rule and government than about beauty and love.
These uncertainties and doubts arise because the lyric's plain, emphatic style invites us to look towards a figure it refuses to disclose. In this respect the poem as a whole rests on a collision between the manner of the love lyric—where the conventionality of postures allows a poet to do no more than gesture towards the lady addressed, and epigram, which demands precise anatomy of those it characterises. The sententious style invites us, in Bacon's term ‘to enquire farther’, but its unconnectedness denies the means to do so.
In some ways this is Campion's oddest poem, made so by its presence in a book of religious lyrics, as well as by its internal complexities. Perhaps there is an answer to its riddling if some classical, Biblical or contemporary figure should be found who answered to its varied description. The other poem to be considered is not opaque in quite the same way, but it too offers teasing challenge to the reader.
Were my hart as some mens are, thy errours would not move me:
But thy faults I curious finde, and speake because I love thee;
Patience is a thing divine and farre, I grant, above mee.
Foes sometimes befriend us more, our blacker deedes objecting,
Then th'obsequious bosome guest, with false respect affecting:
Friendship is the glasse of Truth, our hidden staines detecting.
While I use of eyes enjoy, and inward light of reason,
Thy observer will I be, and censor, but in season:
Hidden mischiefe to conceale in State and Love is treason.
(p. 137)
It is no doubt a coincidence that this poem of judicious reproof is, like the previous example, cast in three-line stanzas and placed third in its book, but there is a similarity of tone and style between the two. This poem, like the last, opens with a sentiment that suggests a straight-forward love-lyric situation, but then takes the reader in an unexpected direction.
While the direction of the poem is less ambiguous than that of the previous example and its basic statement—‘as a friend I must tell you of your faults’—is much more directly conveyed, there is still a degree of uncertainty about the nature of those faults. They begin merely as ‘errors’, move through ‘blacker deedes’ to ‘hidden staines’ which in turn becomes ‘hidden mischiefe’. In retrospect one wonders whether the increasing severity of these terms undermines the tone of sweet reasonableness that the poet adopts at the beginning.
But this is not as significant to the ambiguity of the lyric as the way successive proverbial conclusions to each stanza raise questions about the view we are to take of the poet-speaker. At the simplest level, the three sententiae are carefully arranged in a pattern of increasing objectivity, as ‘I’ becomes ‘our’, and then there is no personal pronoun. This gives an epigrammatic solidity to the ending of the poem. But at the same time there is an opposition between the personal motivation for writing suggested in the second line, and the abstract moral imperative that the last line of the lyric puts forward. The implied questions this raises about the speaker's motivation are reinforced, first by his own admission in the third line, that Patience (and therefore silence) is the ideal, and secondly by the note of self-congratulation that creeps in to the seventh line.
It is, in the end, a matter of tone. It is possible to read the poem as Davis does, seeing the lover as ‘an honest man’ who reaches ‘final balance of critic, servant (“observer”), and detached though tender wellwisher’. In my reading, however, it is not so much the poet who presents ‘a complex and responsible attitude’, as the reader who realises that a poet pretending well-motivated concern is sheltering a rather vindictive wish to broadcast failings and injuries under the hypocritical cloak of public and proverbial moralising. In other words, where Davis takes the detachedness of this lyric's epigrammatic posture as assured, it seems to me that Campion has taken the proverbial matter which forms the basis of the second stanza and subjected its wisdom to scrutiny by placing it within a lyric mode which permits the reader to question a speaker's motivation as it stands revealed in evolving dramatic speech.
My difference with Davis here is a mark of a more fundamental disagreement about the final verdict to be delivered on Campion's poetry. For him the epigrammatic quality of some of Campion's verse enables ‘a full and sententious exploration of reality’, and those poems have ‘the true ring of the classical tone he had sought in vain during his early classicist imitations’. In part my own contentment with many of those ‘classicist imitations’ is as much the product of buried prejudices as Davis's preference for plain style. But in the end it seems to me that Campion did not accept quite so readily that the stylistic devices of the epigram, the detachment it encoded and the wisdom it professed, were any more ‘real’ than any other literary version of reality.
Auden offered a view diametrically opposed to Davis's:
What he has to offer us is succession of verbal paradises in which almost the only element taken from the world of everyday reality is the English language. Since words, unlike musical notes, are denotative, his songs have to be ‘about’ some topic like love or religion, but the topic is not itself important.45
Campion himself would, in the light of his comments quoted at the beginning of this chapter, have been surprised if not offended by this attitude. It seems to me that it is too simply a prelude for what Auden wanted to say about Campion's metrical skill, and does not recognise that Campion's poetry, in its continual play with texts, conventions and styles, though it may not confront ‘reality’ directly, does by its questioning confront and test the perspectives that lyric poetry offers upon reality. Something of his skill as a metrical craftsman will be discussed later. It is the hope of this chapter that it offers a picture of a poet intellectually active himself, and offering to the reader a mental stimulus as well as sensual pleasure in sound.
Notes
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Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne (Princeton, 1967); Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 279-87.
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Campion in the dedication speaks of ‘These youth-borne Ayres’, implying early composition.
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John T. Irwin, ‘Thomas Campion and the Musical Emblem’, SEL (Winter, 1970), pp. 121-141; Stephen Ratcliffe, Campion: On Song (London, 1981).
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See O.B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument (Chapel Hill, 1962), pp. 113-62.
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Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (London, 1964), p. 248, notes the significance of the number seven for Spenser's elegy Daphnaida.
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Quoted by Hardison, p. 114.
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Cf. Montaigne's ‘Upon some verses of Vergil’ in Florio's translation ed. Saintsbury (London, 1893) III, p. 84: ‘The Gods (saith Plato) have furnished man with a disobedient, skittish and tyrannical member, which like an untamed furious-beast, attempteth by the violence of his appetite to bring all things under his becke.’
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Compare the experience of Christian in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress: ‘Now was Christian much affected with his deliverance from all the dangers of his solitary way, which dangers, though he feared them more before, yet he saw them more clearly now, because the light of the day made them conspicuous to him’. ed. Roger Sharrock (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 99.
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‘A shape or pattern will, other things being equal, tend to be continued in its initial mode of operation.’ Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956), p. 92.
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The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford, 1962), p. 200.
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The same juxtaposition was preserved in the revision of these poems in The Fourth Booke (pp. 190, 192).
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Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979), pp. 213-50.
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Horace, Odes, I. xxii. It also reflects something of Psalm I.
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‘And because loue is of all other humane affections the most puissant and passionate … it requireth a forme of Poesie variable, inconstant, affected, curious and most witty of any others, whereof the ioyes were to be vttered in one sorte, the sorrowes in an other, and by the many formes of Poesie, the many moodes and pangs of louers, thoroughly to be discovered'. The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), p. 36.
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See R. L. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven and London, 1981), Ch. 1, and a stimulating discussion in Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford, 1979) pp. 35-77.
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Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, pp. 237-8.
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Martin Luther, A Commentarie up in the 15 Psalmes, translated by Henrie Bull (London, 1577) p. 240.
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By L. Bradner, ‘References to Chaucer in Campion's Poemata’, RES xii (1936), pp. 322-3. I am assured by Professor McConica that recent research has produced no evidence of Campion's recusancy.
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Cf. Herbert's ‘Holy Scriptures’.
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Marlowe's translation, in The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 172.
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Catullus, Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris, Loeb Classical Library (Revised ed., London, 1962) pp. 6-7.
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See Gordon Braden, ‘Vivamus mea Lesbia in the English Renaissance’, ELR [English Literary Renaissance] ix (1979), pp. 199-224.
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For Campion and Propertius see J. V. Cunningham, ‘Campion and Propertius’, PQ [Poetry Quarterly] xxxi (1952), p. 96 and L. P. Wilkinson, ‘Propertius and Thomas Campion’, London Magazine vii (1967), pp. 56-65.
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R. O. A. M. Lyne, The Latin Love Poets (Oxford, 1980), pp. 74-8.
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In the ‘Second Song’ of Astrophil and Stella.
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Edward Doughtie, ed., Lyrics from English Airs 1596-1622 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 223.
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Doughtie, p. 77.
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John Hollander arrives at a similar conclusion by a different route in Vision and Resonance (New York, 1975), pp. 78-9.
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ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 289.
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The Complete Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 123.
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II. xxviii, 49-52. Loeb edn. pp. 146-9.
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Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947), p. 16.
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Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (Chicago, 1968), p. 200.
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Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind (Berkeley, 1973), p. 75.
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Colie, p. 69.
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See H. H. Hudson, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton, 1947), pp. 6-9.
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Smith, p. 176.
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Hudson, p. 4.
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Smith, p. 199.
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Smith, p. 67.
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The first of these epigrams exists in two versions. See Davis, p. 505.
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‘These songs show writers irresponsibly, blithely addicted to arriving at conclusions of the general nature usually considered proper to reasonable discourse’. Tuve, p. 18.
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Smith, p. 208.
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Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchen (London, 1915), p. 142.
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W. H. Auden and John Hollander, Selected Songs of Thomas Campion (Boston, 1972), p. 11.
Abbreviations
ELR English Literary Renaissance
ELS The English School of Lutenist Song Writers, ed. E. H. Fellowes (London, 1920-32). Revised ed. by Thurston Dart and others, as The English Lute-Songs (1959-)
PQ Philological Quarterly
RES Review of English Studies
SEL Studies in English Literature
I have used two editions of Campion, those by Davis (London, 1969), and Fellowes, in ELS. Where reference is primarily to the text I give page references to Davis, where to the music I use B.A.; I; etc. (For A Booke of Ayres, The First Booke etc.,) followed by the song numbers. In Chapter 3 both are given; Though the musical examples are based on Fellowes's edition I give the text in Davis's old-spelling form.
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