[In the following excerpt, Mellers looks at how poetry and music interact in selected music by Campion. Mellers also speculates on how Campion composed such pieces.]

                    Author of light
When to her lute Corinna sings
                    Follow thy fair sun
          It fell on a summer's day

We have seen how, in the madrigals of Ward and still more of Wilbye, a new kind of musical structure, apposite to a new kind of experience, was in process of evolution. This new technique often implied, and sometimes literally involved, instrumental resources; ultimately it was to seek fulfilment in the humanistic (rather than divine) ritual of opera. But in order to provide the basic elements of operatic music there had to be, alongside the development in ensemble techniques, a complementary development in solo song. Such a development was in any case natural in a society that stressed the humanly expressive power of words. Thomas Campion, equally celebrated as both poet and composer, and the leading theorist among the writers of ayres, emphasized the solo song with lute accompaniment precisely because in pieces for a solo voice music and sweet poetry could agree without the absurdities sometimes occasioned, in the madrigal, by contrapuntal treatment. At the most rudimentary level, the words in a solo song could be heard, not merely by the singer, but also by others who cared to listen. The lute, a sensitive but quiet instrument, could add its expressive commentary on the words as sung by the soloist. But there was no danger that the lute would become too obtrusive. The words would be immediately comprehensible; their human significance would be perhaps more directly ‘realized’ when they were sung rather than spoken.

In conformity with the spirit of the humanist movement Campion—like the Pléiade group associated with Ronsard in sixteenth century France, and like the Italian experimenters who worked for Count Bardi in the early years of the seventeenth century—imagined that in thus making music the overflow of poetry he was reviving the principles of classical antiquity. He even went so far as to try to systematize the setting of words by a literal equation of long and short syllables with long and short notes. Yet though his theory may seem pedantic, his practice is another matter. Basically he followed traditional notions of the relation between music and words. He resembled the French in that he wanted the musical rhythm to derive directly from the inflexions of the text as spoken, since music was ‘la soeur puisnée de la poésie’. He resembled the Italians in that he wanted the lyricism of the musical line to be convincing in itself. When the complete fulfilment of this ideal was achieved—in the later work of Dowland and to a lesser degree Danyel—it entailed, as we shall see, some sacrifice in theoretic consistency. We should, however, start with Campion, if only because he was equally talented as poet and composer and perhaps for that reason the most conscious experimenter in the possibilities of music for a solo voice. From his work we can obtain an idea of the general principles by which Elizabethan composers tackled the setting of a text. We will begin with the simplest, because most ‘systematic’, example; proceed to some subtler cases from Campion's own work; and so lead on to the fulfilment of the ayre—which is also to some degree the relinquishment of Campion's theory—in the mature work of Dowland.

Unlike the madrigal, the ayre was normally strophic, the same music serving for several verses of the poem. Of course we do not know precisely how a man such as Campion set about writing an ayre. We may guess, perhaps, that he wrote the first stanza of his poem and then composed the music for it: unless, indeed, the music grew almost simultaneously with the words. This music must reflect the meaning of the text, so that thus far the music has been moulded by the poem. It is probable, however, that the poem will be incomplete in one stanza; and any further stanzas the poet writes must now fit the conventions of the already existing music. In the first verse the music is conditioned by the poetry. In the second verse the poetry must be conditioned by the music.

The song, which is of a religious nature, is in two stanzas.¹

Author of light, revive my dying sprite;
Redeem it from the snares of all confounding night.
Lord, light me to thy blessed way,
For blind with worldly vain desires I wander as
                    a stray.
Sun and moon, stars and underlights I see,
But all their glorious beams are mists and darkness
                    being compared to thee.
Fountain of health, my soul's deep wounds recure.
Sweet showers of pity rain, wash my uncleanness pure.
          One drop of thy desired grace
The faint and fading heart can raise, and in joy's
                    bosom place.
Sin and Death, Hell and tempting Fiends may rage;
But God his own will guard, and their sharp pains
                    and grief in time assuage.

The first stanza depends on a characteristic Renaissance equivocation between World and Spirit. What the long sweeping rhythm suggests is a powerful awareness of the glories of the visible universe: ‘confounding night’ and ‘worldly vain desires’ turn out to be symbolized by the splendours of sun, moon, stars and underlights. It would seem to be pious duty, rather than inner conviction, that says these wonders are mists and darkness in the sight of God. In the second stanza the religious element is much stronger, because Campion is now thinking of the purgatorial process, in personal terms. This immediacy is conveyed, for instance, in the beautiful rise in rhythmic impetus as the fading heart is ‘raised’. So in this stanza the ambiguous equation of the glories of the cosmos with worldly vanity disappears; the opposition is now unequivocally the powers of evil, sin, death, hell, and the fiends. This shift in emphasis provides Campion with his only problem in setting the poem strophically.

The opening apostrophe to the divinity is set to the noble interval of the falling fifth—the most stable of all interval relationships after the octave. The bass line rises to suggest the revivifying process of the flooding of light: but rises chromatically, so that light leads inevitably to its polar opposite, darkness and death. The highest note of the bass (E flat) makes a harsh dissonance with the lute's suspended seventh; above it, ‘dying’ is expressed by a drooping phrase, syncopated across the bar-line to create a little catch in the breath, with a tremulous semiquaver melisma. Thus this first line is a beautiful example of music's power to convey, through inherently musical means, two contradictory ideas—birth and death—at the same time.

In the next line, the reference to redemption suggests a clear diatonic phrase, built on a firmly rising fourth, in the relative major; whereas ‘all confounding night’ is set again to a strained syncopation and a perturbing melisma. ‘Lord, light me to thy blessed way’, is set in hopefully rising thirds, with a cross rhythm that carries the movement eagerly forward. But the cross rhythm then becomes, not hopeful impetus, but broken hesitancy; the melody really does ‘wander as astray’, swayed by worldly vain desires, fumbling and stumbling like a blind man. ‘Sun and Moon’ significantly recalls the opening address to the Author of Light, being a decorated version of the falling fifth. Thus it is at once a point of musical structure and illustrative: obscurely revealing, indeed, because it seems to equate the Author of Light with the Sun and so makes the ostensible identity between the sun and earthly error still odder. The leaping sixth and the cross rhythm of ‘but all their glorious beams’ convey the poet's rising excitement, prancing up to the high D with what we might take for resplendent affirmation. Then the line descends an octave when the ‘glorious beams’ turn out to be mists and darkness, which are set chromatically, of course, because chromaticism destroys tonal stability and the natural order. But the passage begins low and rises, because it is an ascent from the uncertainty of the mists to the certainty of God's love. The major triad at the end is thus, though conventional, also symbolic.

Having created this music, flowing so inevitably from the text, Campion then writes another stanza which nearly fits the music. Instead of ‘Author of light’ we have, for the noble fifth; ‘Fountain of health’. For the syncopation, melisma and dissonance we have ‘deep wounds’ instead of ‘dying sprite’. ‘Sweet showers of pity’ take the place of redemption; and ‘uncleanness’ that of confounding night. The faint and fading heart serves the same purpose as the blind wandering eyes; the heart-beat threatens to stop before it presses up through the sharpened seventh to the major triad on ‘raise’. The only snag comes in the next line, when sin and hell are so inappropriately identified with the sun and moon: unless one thinks that this is in the profoundest sense logical, since only through the agency of the devil is the purgatorial process possible. In any case the chromatic ascent and major triad is perfect for the last line's assuaging of ‘sharp pains and grief’.

The technique of musical allegory that Campion uses in this song harks back at least as far as the fifteenth century. With Campion, however, musical allegory is being translated into emotional realism. It is significant that the element of rather naive systematization is not present in his secular songs even when—as in “When to her lute Corinna sings”²—both the poetic and musical imagery are based on a conscious stylization.

When to her lute Corinna sings,
Her voice revives the leaden strings,
And doth in highest notes appear
As any challenged echo clear.
          But when she doth of mourning speak,
          E'en with her sighs the strings do break.
And as her lute doth live or die;
Led by her passion, so must I.
For when of pleasure she doth sing,
My thoughts enjoy a sudden spring;
          But if she doth of sorrow speak,
          E'en from my heart the strings do break.

The two stanzas of this poem bear much the same relationship to one another as do the two stanzas of “Author of light”: the first makes a general statement, the second reveals its personal application. Each stanza is based on a dichotomy between the opening quatrain, which is positive, and the concluding couplet, which is negative. The first two lines carry the music—as Corinna's singing revives the leaden strings—from G minor into the relative major, and then sharpward into the dominant, with an ornamental resolution to make the revival more reviving. A dancing lilt appears with the words ‘and doth in highest notes appear’, with repeated quavers prancing up through an octave. The phrase about the challenged echo excites this merry confidence by way of a cross rhythm; and the section ends, after eight symmetrical bars, with a clear modulation to the dominant major. The second half of the musical structure, which sets the couplet with some verbal repetition, is asymmetrical, as broken and disturbed as the quatrain is assured. The change comes with the chromatic E flat that enters the lute part on the word ‘mourning’, taking us back to the tonic minor. Then the sighs are set in a fragmentary dialogue between voice and lute, the verbal inflexion being literally broken as we pant for breath, yet in rising sequences, so that our agitation cumulatively increases. At the climax the strings ‘break’ in a descending arpeggio, echoed by the lute. In the excitement, a bar is dropped out of the eight-bar period. After an empty silence the voice rounds off with an ornamental cadence, repeating the words ‘the strings do break’. The ornament is a quiver, almost a literal break in the voice.

The second stanza repeats this poetic and musical pattern exactly. The word ‘passion’ has the ornamental arabesque that in the first verse suggested revival. The cross rhythm for the challenged echo becomes the spring of joyful thoughts, prepared by the octave leap on ‘pleasure’. In the second stanza the word ‘heart’ gets the stress that her sighs had originally. The music is not different; but we hear it more sympathetically because we now know that the conceit is not merely musical. It is not just the lute strings that are breaking, but also the strings of my heart.

This song is a fairly direct, if in effect subtle, example of poetic-musical form. Campion's lyrics are sometimes much more complex in their apparent simplicity; and when the verse's equivocations are complex the musical imagery is likewise richer in effect.

Like so many Elizabethan lyrics “Follow thy fair sun”³ is based upon a paradox.

Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow.
                    Though thou be black as night,
                    And she made all of light,
Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow.
Follow her whose light thy light depriveth.
                    Though here thou liv'st disgraced,
                    And she in heaven is placed,
Yet follow her whose light the world reviveth.
Follow those pure beams whose beauty burneth,
                    That so have scorched thee,
                    As thou still black must be
Till her kind beams thy black to brightness turneth.
Follow her while yet her glory shineth.
                    There comes a luckless night,
                    That will dim all her light;
And this the black unhappy shade divineth.
Follow still, since so thy fates ordained.
                    The sun must have his shade,
                    Till both at once do fade,
The sun still 'proved, the shadow still disdained.

The basic idea is that the beloved is compared to the sun, which is the source of light and life; she is great creating Nature and therefore not so far from God (compare “Author of light” and Raleigh's “What is our life?”) The lover is the shadow. He is black and melancholy, presumably because the sun is indifferent to him: and also because apart from her, the sun, he has no existence. She is made all of light, and even if she is not God would seem to be a god: whereas in his blackness there is a taint of sin too, perhaps a suggestion of lost innocence. She is beyond moral judgment, he is a miserable sinner. She is in heaven and her light brings life to the world; but he, as shadow, lives ‘disgraced’, cut off from both heaven (her) and earth.

In the third stanza, however, there is a shift in the metaphor. Her ‘pure beams’ have burned him up, blackened him, not like a shadow but like charcoal. At least he now has material existence; and there is a further suggestion that black charcoal may turn to bright diamond, which is a treasure, solid and real, not an illusory shadow. So in the fourth stanza the shadow grows stronger. For a moment we even think he might be stronger, last longer, than the sun: for he points out that she is not really impervious to time and change; the sun's glory will be dimmed by night, when she and he will be equal. His final thrust is that the ‘sun must have his shade, till both at once do fade’; they need one another, just as good cannot be conceived except in reference to evil. This is true despite conventional estimates of the relative worth of sun and shadow. There is a slightly sinister smugness, perhaps, in the shadow's turning of the tables.

This equivocal quality comes out in the music, which is again strophic. The first phrase is set simply and diatonically; a gentle arch that suggests how inevitable it is that the shadow should follow the sun. The long notes on ‘though thou’ stress the conditional clause; the slowly declining scale landing on the chromatic F sharp on the word ‘black’ has a resigned, inevitable pathos, rather than intensity. The answering phrase for ‘and she made all of light’ rises up the scale, to balance the shadow's descent. But it rises not diatonically but chromatically; and from the chromaticism springs an equivocation parallel to that of the words. Though we aspire towards the light, the aspiration is also a perturbation; and when we get to the high D we immediately fall through an octave. Abruptly, the sharp third of the cadence is cancelled by the minor third; and the rising chromatic scale literally ‘follows’ us through the instrumental bass, giving a nervous tremor to the harmony, culminating in a stress on the word ‘unhappy’. The cadential resolution, as the phrase declines, has a trembling ornamental dissonance on the word ‘shadow’.

The words of the other stanzas fit the musical images provoked by the first stanza, though sometimes with ironic implications. In stanza 2 the chromatic F sharp on ‘black’ appears on the word ‘disgraced’. The ascending chromatic scale goes up to heaven. Here the words do not seem to be equivocal, but the music tells us that they are, and thus prepares us for the subsequent stanzas. By the time we get to stanza 4 the rising chromatic scale has become a dimming of light: which is what it really was from the start, since, though it rises upwards, its chromatic nature implies uncertainty rather than fulfilment. The long note and melisma on the word ‘shade’ beautifully convey the touch of self-satisfaction at the end of this stanza. The uncertainty thus admitted to remains in the last stanza, where the ascent becomes a fading. We are left with the shadow, as at the beginning, faintly self-indulgent.

A no less subtle example of the strophic song, with an equation between the poetic and musical image, is an apparently light piece, “It fell on a summer's day”:⁴

It fell on a summers day,
While sweet Bessy sleeping lay
In her bower on her bed,
Light with curtains shadowed,
Jamie came. She him spies,
Opening half her heavy eyes.
Jamie stole in through the door;
She lay slumbering as before.
Softly to her he drew near;
She heard him, yet would not hear.
Bessy vowed not to speak;
He resolved that dump to break.
First a soft kiss he doth take;
She lay still and would not wake.
Then his hands learned to woo;
She dreamt not what he would do,
But still slept, while he smiled
To see love by sleep beguiled.
Jamie then began to play;
Bessy as one buried lay,
Gladly still through this sleight
Deceived in her own deceit.
And since this trance begun,
She sleeps every afternoon.

Superficially, this looks like a ballad; but its slightly arch wit is poles apart from the folk spirit. Since the poem is highly sophisticated, the music is appropriately artful. Though it begins with a simple, folk-like phrase for the conventional opening gambit, there is artifice even here: for the second half of the vocal phrase is in canon (a love-pursuit?) with the bass; while the flattened F that harmonizes sweet Bessy gives us, as it were, an unobtrusive, delicate nudge or wink. The little shock of the false relation is sweetly sensuous (she's a gentle creature); yet there is a tang, too, of pleasurable excitement. In the next phrase the dancing, hesitant, irregular rhythm creates the chequered shadows and Bessy's playful sleepiness, the hazy summer's afternoon; this is a case where the musical rhythm complements, rather than intensifies, the extremely subtle verbal rhythm. In the poem these exploratory subordinate clauses lead with a bump into the trenchant words Jamie came. So in the music he comes after a double bar. His rhythm is regular; pressing onwards, with little imitative points: for it is a chase, albeit a love-chase. On the word ‘came’ there is a false relation exactly similar to the earlier one for ‘sweet Bessy’. The pleasurable excitement exists, after all, for them both, for she's in the game, and ‘spies’ him as part of the imitative chase. When she ‘opens half her heavy eyes’, however, we are taken back to the dreamy heat of the afternoon. There is a most delicate cross rhythm to stress the word ‘half’ and a lovely arabesque—at once drowsy and knowing—on the word ‘heavy’.

This pattern of imagery is repeated with delicate precision in each stanza. In stanza 2 the F natural in the bass of bar 3 refers compassionately to the deceit in Bessy's ‘slumbering’. The hesitant cross rhythm that had been the chequered shade becomes Jamie's cat-like approach, Bessy's hearing and not hearing. The imitative passage conveys her ‘vow’, his resolution. The cross rhythmed stress comes on the word ‘resolved’; while the arabesque becomes the breaking of the dump. In stanza 3 the F natural suggests both the shock of the kiss and Bessy's quivery stillness. The hesitant rhythm becomes Jamie's wooingly exploratory hands, Bessy's dreaming and not dreaming. The regular movement of the imitative passage becomes the deceptive quiet of sleep; the archly stressed word is ‘love’, the arabesque becomes a beguiling. In the last stanza the F natural false relation deliciously buries Bessy in sleep, in bed, in love, while the cross rhythm acts the being deceived in her own deceit. The imitative phrase becomes associated with the development of delightful habit, with a tender chuckle, too. The stressed word is ‘every’: which points the joke to round the song off. The arabesque on ‘afternoon’ becomes a cooing; it is impossible to sing it other than comically.

In all these songs the poems are devised so that both imagery and rhythm can be complemented in musical terms, and the parallelism works in each stanza. The strophic convention would seem to imply rigid stylization; yet the songs are remarkable for the unexpectedly rich meanings that emerge from the interlocking of words and music. Though the songs are generalized, lyrical and narrative rather than dramatic, they reveal a personal situation beneath the generalizing convention. This mating of the general with the particular is more potently evident in the work of a much greater composer than Campion, John Dowland. It is significant that the ayres of Dowland are less dependent than those of Campion on the words; and that the texts he set were often, though not always, of inferior poetic merit. In a piece like “It fell on a summer's day” Campion has written a poem that is charming, subtle, and complete in itself. He has created musical images and rhythms which precisely parallel the delicacies of the poem, making a complementary experience; but the music does not ‘improve’ the poem, and is not intended to. Campion is, above all, the poet-composer.

Notes

1. Stainer and Bell, The English School of Lutenist Song Writers. Thomas Campion's First Book of Ayres. Edited by E. H. Fellowes.

2. Stainer and Bell, The English School of Lutenist Song Writers. Thomas Campion's Songs from Rosseter's Book of Ayres, Part I. Edited by E. H. Fellowes.

3. ibid.

4. ibid