SOURCE: Ratcliffe, Stephen. “‘Silent Musick’: The Aesthetics of Ruins.” In Campion: On Song, pp. 3-15. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

[In the essay that follows, Ratcliffe attacks how critics have written about Campion as a composer and poet, arguing they do not address why he is good. Ratcliffe then offers his own analysis of Campion's works.]

Praised in his own lifetime, largely forgotten by the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, resurrected in A.H. Bullen's Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age (1887), Thomas Campion now enjoys a secure but minor reputation as one of the finest poets of the English Renaissance. His verse is valued chiefly for its technical mastery, its management of sound, syntax, rhythm and meter, formal and logical structure. Its virtue—a smoothly polished precision, a gracefully delicate charm which has become synonymous with his name—has most often been accounted for by remembering that Campion himself was a poet-composer who wrote “ayres,” or songs, the music as well as the words: “In these English Ayres, I have chiefely aymed to couple my Words and Notes lovingly together, which will be much for him to doe that hath not power over both.”¹

The unfortunate result of this tendency to explain Campion's literary excellence in terms of his talent, his “double gift of music and poetry,”² has been that for the last eighty-five years Campion criticism has paid surprisingly little attention to either his words by themselves or his words together with their music. Indeed, if Pound is correct (“You can spot the bad critic when he starts by discussing the poet and not the poem”³), Campion has attracted more than his share of offenders. Bullen himself set the precedent by implying that Campion's “lyrics” were good because of his unique abilities: “At least one composer, Thomas Campion, wrote both the words and the music of his songs; and there are no sweeter lyrics in English poetry than are to be found in Campion's song-books.”⁴ Percival Vivian, instead of pursuing what he took to be the distinguishing feature of Campion's verse, was also satisfied to point to its source in Campion's skill as a trained and sensitive musician: “Campion's verse was from the beginning free and musical. This musical quality is indeed the one which distinguishes the whole of his poetry; it is undoubtedly connected with the practice of musical composition and due to a feeling for musical effect, to which, with his trained musical ear, he was peculiarly susceptible.”⁵ Miles Kastendieck proposed that Campion comes closest to representing the ideal of the lyric poet, again “because he had the talent for both music and poetry.”⁶ While managing to focus upon certain key attributes of Campion's verse, Roy Fuller still found in his “ingenious mixture of meters” and his “marvellous rhythmic subtleties” the “evidence of an extraordinarily free and beautiful rhythmic talent.”⁷

The fact is that by concentrating upon this “talent” as an unusual and remarkable phenomenon, people have made Campion into something of a wunderkind, a sacred cow, or, rather, a sacred calf. For his consignment to the rank of minor poet, and the scant critical attention he has received therein, confirms the apparent accuracy of John Irwin's complaint that “the musical qualification which his reputation bears … remains a form of special pleading which, whatever its judicious surface appearance, has the effect of protecting Campion from having to compete on the highest poetic levels.”⁸ People have accorded to Campion a privileged status, Irwin argues, because we have assumed that words originally written for music cannot achieve as much “metaphysical” weight and density of meaning as words originally written by themselves. He discovers, in what is probably the best piece of Campion criticism to date, that this assumption is incorrect at least as applied to Campion, whose verse reveals “a balanced, multi-level meaning other than the metaphysical,” one that offers a reader more than enough of its own kind of pleasing complexity.

The claim Irwin makes, that Campion's “richness of meaning” lends itself to analysis as well as that of some of his more widely read contemporaries, has nonetheless been effectively denied by the fact that editors and critics alike, while agreeing that Campion's poems are indeed good, have been generally reluctant or unable to say precisely why. Whether or not Hallet Smith's simple rationalization is true (“Campion is the finest of the Elizabethan poets who wrote for music, and the reason is the obvious one that he was a composer at the same time”), it tells us little about exactly what in the poems makes them so good; nor is the matter so obvious, as Smith himself shows when he confesses that the relation between Campion's verse and music is “difficult to explain for the reason that he wrote both, and quite possibly there was interaction between them in the process of composition.”⁹ Most critics have headed in the same direction, fixing upon Campion's “musical qualification” as the original mark of his success. The need to return that success back to its source is typified by W.H. Auden's admission that though Campion's words can be enjoyed by themselves, “they would not be what they are or sound as they do if he had not, when he wrote them, been thinking in musical terms.”¹⁰

I do not mean to suggest that these efforts have been entirely misguided. They have not; on the contrary, the fact that it has proved so much easier to discover causes than to describe effects itself suggests something important about the uniqueness of Campion's excellence. It was Pound's conviction that “poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”¹¹ The Symbolists before him tried to find a “pure poetry,” one which would come as close to music as writing could. Campion himself has been recently named “the greatest master in English poetry of what the French symbolists called la poesie pure,”¹² and if the musical qualification that Campion's reputation carries has discouraged a true estimate of his work, as Irwin claims, the fact still remains that Campion did write songs, did “couple [his] Words and Notes lovingly together.” If for no other reason, though Campion may perhaps be “minor” in comparison with certain of his contemporaries (Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne), as a composer of words and music he nonetheless stands alone in a lyric tradition that includes not only Shakespeare, Jonson and Donne, but Wyatt, Sydney, Herrick, Blake and Tennyson.

The history of Campion's curious reputation is itself curious. With little or no precedent for the criticism of Elizabethan lyrics except that of Hazlitt (“[they] as often wore a sylph-life form with Attic vest, with faery feet, and the butterfly's gaudy wings”),¹³ one can certainly excuse an editor like Bullen for his full-blown account of Campion's famous disclaimer that his poems in A Book of Ayres were “eare-pleasing rimes without Arte”: “‘Ear-pleasing’ they undoubtedly are; there are no sweeter lyrics in English poetry than are to be found in Campion's song-books. But ‘without art’ they assuredly are not, for they are frequently models of artistic perfection. … what a wealth of golden poetry … !”¹⁴ Nor is it surprising, with the fin de siecle appetite for the “sweet” lyric whetted by such poets as Tennyson, Rossetti and Swinburne, to find that Bullen's Lyrics from the Song-Books, which included the words to forty songs by Campion, and his privately printed edition of The Works of Dr. Thomas Campion three years later, received the highest acclaim. What is surprising, though, is that from this modest debut Campion's popularity should have increased to the point where, only sixteen years after his initial discovery, Bullen felt it necessary to prefix this summary and warning note to his 1903 Muses' Library edition: “In 1887 Campion's admirers were few indeed. By critics and by anthologists he had been persistently neglected. I pleaded that the time had come for him to take his rightful place among our English poets; and the plea was so successful that he now runs the risk of becoming the object of uncritical adulation.”¹⁵ Ironically enough, Bullen's adjectival enthusiasm in introducing what another early editor called “a poet that he had almost made his own”¹⁶ had made Bullen himself the chief source of the danger he feared.

Even more remarkable is the fact that Campion criticism has continued to employ the kind of adulatory but hollow labels that Bullen first cautioned against. Instead of offering a close and systematic investigation of exactly what in the poems have made them so highly admired and valued by so many readers, when they talk about Campion even good critics begin to sound like dutiful sophomores paying special lip service. To Kastendieck, “Campion was an individualistic artist whose fastidious taste in the combination of words and notes brought to his ayres a certain grace and rare sense of perfection charactristic of all Elizabethan song and, of course, the secret of its spontaneity.”¹⁷ Claiming that “his poems can be divided only into the good and the better, or else into the more and less characteristic,” C.S. Lewis praised Campion as “the one poet whose loss would leave a chasm in our literature.”¹⁸ To Douglas Bush, the poems are “jewels of pure art or artifice which carry no trace of the everyday world.”¹⁹ Auden elevates them one step higher, calling the poems “a succession of verbal paradises in which the only element taken from the world of everyday reality is the English language.”²⁰ Though often enough suggestive, these attempts to define Campion's excellence have generally avoided testing his poems with the kind of critical scrutiny exercised on other poets. Campion criticism to date has remained enthusiastically imprecise and, therefore, inadequate.

More than its enthusiasm or its imprecision, however, the main inadequacy of twentieth-century Campion criticism has been its failure to perceive that Campion's excellence is embodied in the principal relationship of his verse to his music as complex parts of an even more complex whole. This failure is reflected in modern criticism's wide disagreement on the question of whether Campion's words should be considered with or without his music. The problem and its implications are serious, and need to be examined more closely.

From what I have said earlier a reader might guess that Bullen and the other great English editors, whose work at the end of the nineteenth century brought to light material which to that time had been largely unknown, considered Campion's music secondary to his words. And he would be correct. The praise which these first editors heaped upon their discovery seems clearly to indicate that they viewed him primarily as a poet—indeed, as a literary ancestor of those late Victorian poets whom they themselves most admired. While they paid token recognition to the fact that Campion's “poems” were actually songs that could be sung, to them the music was more or less unimportant. Bullen himself, whose monumental literary efforts included editions of Marlowe, Shakespeare and numerous other dramatists, as well as a long list of verse anthologies (England's Helicon, An English Garner, Lyrics from the Dramatists of the Elizabethan Age, Speculum Amantis, Musa Proterva), was described by Yeats as “a fine scholar in poetry who hates all music but that of poetry, and knows of no instrument that does not fill him with rage and misery.”²¹ Ernest Rhys, whose own work included editions of Ben Johnson, Dekker, Vaughan and Keats, indicated a similar literary bias:

Campion was all but a lost poet when Mr. Bullen so fortunately came to his rescue six years ago. His lyrics, with the exception of the very few turned to account by modern musicians, or given a place in the anthologies, lay buried in the old music books in which they were first published. And yet, if they had been left to the famous obscurity of the British Museum, we had lost perhaps the one poet who came nearest to fulfilling, in the genre and quality of his work, the lyric canon in English poetry.²²

Percival Vivian's attitude toward music is revealed in this small note to the fourth song in A Booke of Ayres: “the air to which this song is set does duty also for ‘Seeke the Lord and in his wayes persever’”²³ (my italics). The implication here—altogether justified on the evidence Vivian presents—is that music is secondary, subservient, to the poem, the words.

In fact it was. Though Campion's poems had been originally conceived of as songs, and published as a text of words embedded in a musical score (the usual practice for the lute-song was to print the words of the first stanza of each ayre beneath the notes to which they were to be sung; the second and subsequent stanzas were then printed out in metrical form as stanzas beneath the music²⁴), modern editors from Bullen on had effectively divorced his words from his music by printing the words only. This was more than a matter of convenience, though it was that too. With both Bullen's and Vivian's editions of Campion containing the words to all of his songs, his four masks, his Observations in the Art of English Poetry, A New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counterpoint (omitted by Bullen), and his Latin epigrams and elegies, and already running to four hundred pages, neither can be blamed for not choosing to include all of Campion's music as well. Nevertheless, Bullen, Rhys and Vivian were primarily literary scholars, editors who made it their business to rescue poets lost “in the famous obscurity of the British Museum”—poets like Campion.

It was against this background, twelve years after publication of the complete Campion song-books in Fellowes' English School of Lutenist Song-writers series, that Miles Kastendieck first proposed his radically alternative view. Reacting against the consideration of Campion's songs as poems only, a perspective encouraged by the fact that Campion's early editors had printed only his words, Kastendieck claimed that the lack of attention paid to the music by literary scholars and critics had resulted in a peculiarly limited point of view. Bringing a musical as well as literary background to the first full-scale study of Campion, England's Musical Poet, Kastendieck proposed an historically more accurate approach to the matter of Campion's words and music. The fact that Campion was a composer of both words and music, he argued, forces us to extend the meaning of “lyric” back to its etymological origin:

Campion, then, is to be considered more than a poet. He was both a poet and a musician. He must, therefore, be introduced again as a musical poet in the true meaning of the words. The music that swayed so many poets was part of his creative work. He did not write poems, but “ayres.” If, in writing these ayres, he excelled as a lyric poet, that is all the more to his credit. To call him a lyric poet while recognizing only his literary achievement is to present half an artist.²⁵

Unfortunately, however much his novel critical perspective may have gained him, Kastendieck's argument proved to be little more than another attempt to make Campion's music responsible for what everyone had already perceived to be the excellence of his words. The idea that, because he was a musician, Campion's skill as a poet is “all the more to his credit” is a perfect example of that familiar kind of lip service which gives in to the temptation to locate beauty and excellence in its cause, or means, rather than effects. Even so, while the consensus had in fact always been that Campion's musical skill was very much “to his credit,” was even somehow directly responsible for the high literary quality of his work, Kastendieck carried the matter a logical step further by arguing that the appreciation of Campion's poetic texts must be broadened to include a consideration of those musical texts with which they had first been conceived and executed. The measure of the musical poet's success was to be found only in this “perfect union of words and notes”:

The full charm of this relationship in the ayres can be appreciated only when they are considered in their original settings. When read, the lyrics, however refreshing and delightful they may be, are nevertheless incomplete without the musical setting. The music brings an added daintiness, a resonant melody, and, most significant of all, a series of little changes in meanings and subtle connotations.

(p. 70)

Though both the timeliness of his revaluation and the significance of his reinterpretation should not be denied, the general imprecision that characterizes these remarks points to the limited success that Kastendieck had in coming any closer to determining what specifically in Campion's songs makes them so good. Both his description of the lyrics by themselves (“refreshing,” “delightful”) and his explanation of what a musical setting adds to them (“daintiness, a resonant melody. … a series of little changes in meanings and subtle connotations”) are nearly as vague and unhelpful as they seem. Like Bullen and the rest, Kastendieck had come not to anatomize and dissect Campion but simply to praise him.

The reaction to Kastendieck followed quickly. Six years after the appearance of England's Musical Poet, Ralph W. Short published an article directly opposed to the idea that Campion's poems cannot be fully appreciated without their original settings. On the contrary, Short argued, music can only be an obstacle to the full appreciation of any poem:

A musical setting is so overpoweringly, determinatively sensuous that in its presence the subtleties of lyric poetry have little chance of making themselves felt. However various music itself may be, it dogmatizes upon any words that accompany it; it dictates one reading and precludes the hearing of any other, whereas for much great poetry there is no one right reading, but several which must be simultaneously apprehended. … Campion's tunes rig out his lyrics in pretty but concealing finery; his best poems mean more, as poems, when silently read than when sung or intoned. For this reason, whoever aims at justly appreciating his poetry had best forget his music.²⁶

Obviously cast in the wake of Empson's celebration of ambiguity as the main criterion of poetic excellence, which was itself the product of what Walter R. Davis has referred to as Eliot's “domination of the literary scene of the 1920's,”²⁷ Short's defense of the necessary independence of words and music, and, what is more, of the real necessity of taking words by themselves, has found a far greater following than Kastendieck's argument to the contrary. If critics like Lowbury, Salter and Young admit that “in becoming words for music, poetry, complete in its own right, changes its shape and acquires an apparent incompleteness,”²⁸ they do not seem to be disturbed by that music's absence. If others admit that by not knowing a Campion song's music they may well be missing a vital part of its wholeness, they justify their ignorance by also admitting that the task of appreciating Campion's words by themselves—however much their music may add to one's appreciation—is more than enough. Indeed, as Catherine Ing explains it, there is good reason why the study of Campion's words without their music is sufficient in its own right, why critics have been willing to accept a part of their subject for the whole:

hundreds of readers have recognized as poetry, and loved and admired, the verse for songs, who not only have not known the music, but have for various reasons failed to enjoy the music when known. It is, I think, justifiable to look for the causes of such enjoyment of the poetry alone in elements of the poetry alone. There is in this poetry a structure, which contributes to enjoyment, made in words alone, words which cannot do all that music can do, but can in themselves make a purely poetic (or literary) beauty that it is not music's function to make.²⁹

Ing's statement is important, first for its attempt to locate the cause of that pleasure which a song's words have given to readers who neither know nor like its music, and second for its effort to distinguish the separate value that verse by itself can have. What she says here needs to be said because it is true. Because it is obvious it needs to be said all the more. Poetry and music are two different kinds of things, one made in words and one in notes, each one built upon and exhibiting its own particular structures and beauties which themselves contribute particular pleasures to those who experience them. At the same time, Ing's statement clearly stands in opposition to Kastendieck's assertion that Campion's words cannot be fully appreciated without their original settings, and to that extent it is like Short's defense of studying words and notes separately. But it is a better and stronger argument than Short's, whose somewhat provincial attitudes kept him from granting any but a negative virtue to a song's music. It is a better argument because it reaches further and comprehends more of the essential differences between poetry and music. It therefore is and should be the standard argument, if one is needed, for justifying a consideration of Campion's words apart from his music.

As it turns out, the justification has not been needed. While the fact that Campion “coupled … Words and Notes lovingly together” is most certainly crucial to our understanding and appreciation of the unique excellence of his songs, as Kastendieck insisted, most of the admiration and attention that they have continued to receive has been willingly directed toward the words only. This is not really surprising. From Williams to Wordsworth, from Creeley to Campion, modern readers take their poetry sitting down, in their classrooms and libraries and studies, from magazines, textbooks, chapbooks, anthologies, edited selections and complete editions. From Bullen's Lyrics from the Song-Books on, the modern reader has come to Campion's songs as “poems,”³¹ as words—and words only—on the page. He has found them in either of the two currently available complete editions (Vivian's and Davis') or, more probably, in the standard anthologies in which Campion is usually given a generous representation (thirty selections in the Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse, sixteen in the Norton Anthology of Poetry). He has not known Campion's music, nor has he needed to know it in order to enjoy the words. Indeed, as Ing suggests, most people who have praised Campion have probably done so without ever having heard or seen his music. They have not heard it because it is not easily available; as far as I know the only recording that gives anything close to a representative sample of Campion (Deutsche Grammophon Archive Production, ten songs on one side only) is long out of print. They are even less likely to have seen it in either Fellowes' Lutenist Song Writers series or in the Scolar Press facsimile reproductions. What is more, if they have, they probably have not understood it. It was one thing for Kastendieck to call for attention to the original settings of Campion's songs, quite another to give those settings the wide circulation or the direct and familiar intelligiblity that his words alone can have.

This was not always the case. Everyone knows that the Elizabethan Age was also an age of song. The standard reference books and histories are full of facts, figures, and stories documenting the musical spirit that pervaded England at the turn of the seventeenth century:

Tinkers sang catches; milkmaids sang ballads; carters whistled; each trade, and even the beggars, had their special songs; the base-viol hung in the drawing room for the amusement of waiting visitors; and the lute, cittern, and virginals, for the amusement of waiting customers, were the necessary furniture of the barber's shop. They had music at dinner; music at supper; music at weddings; music at funerals; music at night; music at dawn; music at work; music at play.³¹

However much a cliché, Chappell's description is remarkable for two reasons. First, this kind of general history was itself largely the product of a mid or late nineteenth-century view of England's romantic past, a view that stands immediately behind people like Kastendieck, people who have taken the truism as their excuse to ground the excellence of Campion's songs in its historical and biographical necessity rather than in the songs themselves. “In the heart of this world of music and poetry lived Thomas Campion.—poet, musician”:³² the talented byproduct of a talented Age. Second, as far as it goes, Chappell's description of the situation is probably accurate.

The weight of evidence indicating the wide popularity of ballads, folk songs, psalms, madrigals and ayres gives substance to the notion that the Elizabethans knew their music. Music actually seems to have been as important to them as Chappell would have had us believe. More likely than not a musical education was an essential ingredient in the making of the complete gentleman, as Peachman required: “there is no one Science in the world, that so affecteth the free and generous spirit, with a more delightful and in-offensive recreation; or better disposeth the minde to what is commendable and vertuous.”³³ Lute songs and madrigals really were printed so that they could be brought out for the guests to sing after supper, and Philomates' often cited inability either to discuss the art or to carry a tune probably did make him an uncomfortable member of the party:

Among the rest of the guests, by chance master Aphron came thither also, who, falling to discourse of music, was in an argument so quickly taken up and hotly pursued by Eudoxus and Calergus, two kinsmen of Sophobulus, as in his own art he was overthrown; but he still sticking in his opinion, the two gentlemen requested me to examine his reasons and confute them; but I refusing and pretending ignorance, the whole company condemned me of discourtesy, being fully persuaded that I had been as skilful in that art as they took me to be learned in others. But supper being ended and the music books (according to the custom) being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses, I protested unfeignedly that I could not, every one began to wonder; yea, some whispered to others demanding how I was brought up, so that upon shame of mine ignorance I go now to seek out mine old friend Master Gnorimus, to make myself his scholar.³⁴

Thus Philomates. But while he did seek out his Master Gnorimus, and made himself “his scholar,” the point is that we in the twentieth century have not. Few of us have heard Campion's music, fewer still have seen it, and one wonders of those who have how many were willing or able to sing or discourse upon it. We are simply not equipped to make the kind of total appreciation called for by Kastendieck a general possibility.

I want to conclude this chapter with a proposition that opens up a whole sub-subject in aesthetic theory: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those / Unheard are sweeter.” Keats was not thinking of Campion when he wrote that line. Nevertheless, it may be that our ignorance of Campion's music has had something to do with the popularity that Campion's words without music have enjoyed for the last one hundred or so years. Consider cathedrals. Their murals and frescoes are chipped and faded, the whole of their past is clamoring to speak through them. Mayan temples have gone back to the jungle. The Venus de Milo has no arms. The tapestries at the Cloisters in New York are partially rotted. No one alive has heard the sound of Old English. There are some things so good that we are willing to adore fractions of them. Indeed, by their very incompleteness they are enhanced. Since we are forced to imagine the whole from its part—forced to become artists as audience—and since ruins and fragments include the ideal as nothing else can, whatever is wrong must be the remains of a former right, whatever missing perfect beyond imagining. The Parthenon can never have been as beautiful as it must have been when it was new.

According to Valéry, “Hearing verse set to music is like looking at a painting through a stained glass window.”³⁵ One is suddenly aware of another dimension, a whole new set of impinging complexities and possibilities. As if the painting itself were not enough, there is suddenly the added complication of muted colors, subtly transformed figures and patterns, new surfaces, new light, new shades of meaning. There is suddenly a new painting. But what if to begin with the painting were made in the light of a stained glass window; what if it were made to be hung in the window, made to be seen through thousands of pieces of leaded glass, thousands of colored pieces which themselves were integral parts of the whole: wouldn't the painting in natural light become, however beautiful, a fragment, a fraction of the whole? Wouldn't we find ourselves forced to imagine the glass which was missing? Wouldn't we find ourselves artists as audience?

However beautiful, Campion's words without their music are also fragments, ruins, puzzles with missing pieces. Our experience of them is like our experience of old tapestries, Old English, old cathedrals. When we read them beneath a small block of print that tells us these exquisite poems were really the word-half of songs, we are forced to become artists as audience. We are forced to imagine what is missing, the thousands of pieces of colored glass, the unknown complexities of figures and patterns and surfaces. We are forced to include what we do not hear in what we do. The absence of music where music is known to exist has an effect comparable not only to the absence of Venus' arms but the effects of allusion, echo, and non-comic parody; when he comes to the first song in Campion's A Booke of Ayres, for example, what reader does not hear in the background Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus and Come my Celia, let us prove? Similarly, knowing that Campion's music is missing, what reader does not feel the need to supply it, to fill in the empty space behind Campion's words on the page? Who does not hear in the disorder that the absent, but allowed-for, missing order shows us—in Campion's metrical flexibility, his shifting rhythms, his beautifully realized stanzaic patterns—who does not hear the music he does not hear, that silent music whose beauty is indeed perfect and smooth:

          Rose-cheekt Lawra, come
Sing thou smoothly with thy beawties
Silent musick. …

Notes

1. Thomas Campion, Preface to “Two Bookes of Ayres,” The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. Walter R. Davis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1970), p. 55. I quote Campion throughout from this edition.

2. A. H. Bullen, Elizabethans (London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1925), p. 127.

3. Ezra Pound, A B C of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 84.

4. A. H. Bullen, ed., Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age (London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), p. vi.

5. Percival Vivian, ed., Campion's Works (1909; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 1v.

6. Miles Kastendieck, England's Musical Poet (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938), p. 199.

7. Roy Fuller, “Fascinating Rhythm,” The Southern Review, IX (1973), 857-872.

8. John T. Irwin, “Thomas Campion and the Musical Emblem,” SEL (Winter 1970), 121-124. Irwin's article, which begins to suggest some of the complexity I find in “Now Winter Nights Enlarge,” in effect justifies my own further attention to that song.

9. Hallet Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 287, 281.

10. W. H. Auden, ed., Selected Songs of Thomas Campion (Boston: David R. Godine, 1972), p. 9.

11. Pound, p. 14.

12. Auden, p. 11.

13. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (London: George Bell, 1899), p. 174.

14. A. H. Bullen, ed., The Works of Dr. Thomas Campion (London: The Chiswick Press, 1889), p. xvi.

15. A. H. Bullen, ed., Thomas Campion, Songs and Masques with Observations in the Art of English Poetry (London, 1903).

16. Ernest Rhys, ed. The Lyrical Poems of Thomas Campion (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1895), p. xxv. It is interesting to note the praise which Bullen himself received for his discovery. Swineburne, for instance, to whom Bullen sent every edition he put out, had this to say about the importance of the Chiswick Press Campion: “In issuing the first edition of Campion's Works you have added a name to the roll of English poets, and one that can never be hence forward overlooked or erased. Certainly his long neglected ghost ought now to be rejoicing in Elysium. (Letters from Algernon Charles Swineburne to A.H. Bullen, London, 1910, p. 21.) See also these stanzas by Edmund Gosse:

    Bullen, well done!
              Where Campion lies in London-land,
              Lulled by the thunders of the Strand,
    Screened from the sun,

    Surely there must
              Now pass some pleasant gleam
              Across his music-haunted dream,
    Whose brain and lute are dust.

    (Quoted by Amy Cruse, The Elizabethan Lyrists and their Poetry [London, 1913].)

17. Kastendieck, p. 70.

18. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 552-553.

19. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), p. 102.

20. Auden, p. 11

21. Quoted by Kastendieck, p. 44.

22. Rhys, p. viii.

23. Vivian, p. 355.

24. See Bruce Pattison, Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance (London: Methuen & Co., 1970). For an account of a modern editor's difficulty in separating and arranging in metrical form the madrigal lyric from its music, see also Edmund Fellowes, ed., English Madrigal Verse, 1588-1632 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. xxi-xxiv.

25. Kastendieck, pp. 46-47.

26. Ralph W. Short, “The Metrical Theory and Practice of Thomas Campion,” PMLA, LIX (1944), 1004.

27. Walter R. Davis, ed., The Works of Thomas Campion, p. xiii. Davis argues that Campion's reputation was forced into decline because of Eliot's “elevation of John Donne and the other ‘metaphysical’ poets to major status as the really important poets of the English Renaissance, and of metaphysical wit and the complex image as the major evidences of literary worth.” This does not seem to be entirely true. Witness Short's article. Eliot's own remarks on Campion deserve notice: “I should say that within his limits there was no more accomplished craftsman in the whole of English poetry than Campion. I admit that to understand his poems fully there are some things one should know: Campion was a musician, and he wrote his songs to be sung. We appreciate his poems better if we have some acquaintance with Tudor music; and we want not merely to read them, but to hear some of them sung, and sung to Campion's own settings” (“What is Minor Poetry?” On Poets and Poetry [rpt. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1957]).

28. Edward Lowbury, Timothy Salter, and Alison Young, Thomas Campion, Poet, Composer, Physician (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), p. 32.

29. Catherine Ing, Elizabethan Lyrics (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951), p. 150.

30. Borrowing a question from Bertrand Bronson, “When is a ballad not a ballad?” (answer: when it does not have its music), one sees the logic of calling Campion's songs without their music “poems.”

31. W. Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time (London, 1855), quoted by Kastendieck, p. 31.

32. Kastendieck, p. 42.

33. Quoted by Kastendieck, pp. 32-33.

34. Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1957: rpt. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), p. 9.

35. Quoted by Lowbury, Salter, and Young, p. 32.