Poetry of Campion by Thomas Campion

First published: 1595-1617; includes Poemata, 1595; A Booke of Ayres, 1601; Two Bookes of Ayres, 1613; The Third and Fourth Booke of Ayres, 1617

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Of the lyric poets of the English Renaissance, Thomas Campion is for some readers one of the most difficult to appreciate and value. He is not a “difficult” poet in the way John Donne, his more famous contemporary, is difficult, for he is not a poet, as is Donne, with whom one must struggle because of the density of his language, meaning, and imagery. Campion’s language is transparent, his meaning is seldom in doubt, and his imagery is both simple and conventional. Campion comes close to being a pure lyricist whose excellence is not to be described by an appeal to intellectual complexity or to originality, in the Romantic sense of the term, but by an appeal to art, artifice, technique, and the elegant handling of tradition.

Though he wrote some fine religious lyrics and an occasional moral apostrophe, Campion’s true subject is love—not the immediate and frankly sexual love of Donne’s early poetry, but rather the politely erotic game of literary and aristocratic love. The poetry never pretends to be anything but an elegant and highly artificial kind of play, and the poems are full of the conventions, both thematic and stylistic, of the highly formal love poetry of the Renaissance. Amarillis, Laura, shepherds and shepherdesses, rosy cheeks, tears and sighs, Cupids, nymphs, gods and goddesses, and cruel maids and faithless swains abound in Campion. The stylized voices in the poems never utter so immediate and passionate a statement as that which opens Donne’s “Canonization”: “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.” Campion’s speakers utter words that evoke not an immediate situation but a set of general literary conventions: “O Love, where are thy shafts, thy quiver, and thy bow?”

One must understand the special skills and concerns of a poet such as Campion, who wrote within a set of traditional conventions (many of them unfamiliar to modern readers), before one can appreciate the excellence of his verse. Campion was a highly educated man who wrote for a highly sophisticated and educated society. He was trained in both law and medicine, and his schooling and his literary tastes, in both reading and writing, were strongly classical. His first publication was a group of greatly admired Latin poems, the Poemata. In many of his English poems there are verbal echoes of the great Roman poets—Horace, Martial, and, particularly, Catullus, the Roman lyricist of love par excellence. In addition to specific references to the ancient poets in Campion’s work, the atmosphere of many of the poems is powerfully classical, even those poems that have no definite Latin ancestors and those in which the settings are, as is most often the case, English and Renaissance modern (for example, “Jacke and Jone they thinke no ill” and “There is a Garden in her face”).

The classical influence is not merely a matter of allusions to ancient poets and mythology. Such allusions are frequent enough—for example, Campion’s imitation of Catullus’s most famous poem in “My sweetest Lesbia let us live and love”—but not overwhelmingly present. More important is the stylistic influence. The sharply turned epigrammatic statements, the tightly controlled form and language, the avoidance of metaphor and other spectacular figures of speech, the bittersweet and ironic tone that characterizes Campion’s verse—these and other such things are largely the product of the poet’s imitation in English of classical Latin poetry. The significance of all this is enhanced by the fact that the people for whom Campion wrote were also widely read in or at least familiar with ancient poetry. A reference or turn of speech that might puzzle later readers would seem natural, elegant, and effective to Campion’s original audience.

Related to these matters is Campion’s advocacy of writing English poetry in classical meters. The poet, in a very controversial pamphlet titled Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), argued that for English poetry to achieve the highest excellence, poets should avoid rhyme, as did the ancients, and should count poetic feet in terms of the quantitative lengths of vowel sounds rather than in the more natural to English (as opposed to Latin and Greek) method of counting strong and weak accentual stresses. Campion and others who espoused this argument had little effect, and their crusade is now thought of as a literary curiosity. As a matter of fact, Campion himself managed to write only one truly successful rhymeless poem in classical meters (“Rose-cheekt Lawra, come”); all of his most admired pieces are in standard English accentual meters and are in rhyme. It is significant, however, that Campion was involved in this controversy. It shows how important classical practice was to him, how intensely he was involved in the literary arguments of his time, and how concerned he was with the most technical aspects of his art.

As important as the classical aspect of Campion’s art is, however, it must be made clear that much of the traditional material in the poems is drawn from the late medieval courtly love tradition as it was filtered into Renaissance English letters through the poetry of the Italian Petrarchan tradition and the sixteenth century French tradition (itself heavily influenced by the Italian accomplishment) exemplified in the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard and his followers. Nor should the native English tradition of amatory verse from Geoffrey Chaucer through Sir Thomas Wyatt and Edmund Spenser be minimized, although it, too, was heavily influenced by the Italian tradition at every stage. In this literary complex, readers were made familiar with the sighing lover, the abandoned maid, and many other such conventions. It is enough to recognize that Campion wrote within the multifaceted, cosmopolitan tradition of the Renaissance love lyric and that the classics, although not the whole of Campion’s interest, were the most conscious non-English focus of his attention and taste.

Just as readers must be aware of the various literary factors that helped shape Campion’s work, they must also be aware of the influence music had on the poetry. Campion, in addition to being a poet, was a talented composer who wrote almost all of his verse to be set to his own music. In fact, the poet did not often think of his music and his poetry separately. He composed each with an eye to the other, and his overall artistic goal, as he said, was to join his “words and notes lovingly together.” In his work, song gives meaning to the poem, and poem gives meaning to the song.

Campion’s success as a poet-composer had much to do with the fact that he lived in a great age of English music, the age of such composers (many of whom he knew) as William Byrd, John Wilbye, Thomas Morley, John Dowland, Thomas Weelkes, and Orlando Gibbons. The great achievements of all of these composers were in the area of vocal music, and their age thought music and poetry to be much more interdependent than did later ages. The most widely known form of English Renaissance music was the madrigal, a complex kind of song for two to seven voices (though sometimes instruments were substituted for some of the voices). Each voice sang a different melodic line, and thus the simple lyric of the madrigal tended to be dominated by the complexity of the performance. Campion did not concentrate on writing madrigals; rather, he focused on the “ayre,” a relatively simple, clear melodic line composed to be sung by one or two voices to the accompaniment of the lute. As was not true in the madrigal, in the ayre the melody and the poetry were of equal value, and neither dominated the other.

Readers of Campion’s poetry should always remember that the poems alone are less than half the artistic effect Campion originally created. Both the music and, crucially, the artistry of the performer are left out. The reader should also remember that any judgment of the poems separate from the available music, no matter how sensitive, is bound to be less than adequate. An analogy might be made to the twentieth century popular song: How flat would be the experience of reading an anthology of such song poems as compared to the effect of hearing the poems and the music in performance. This analogy breaks down, for those song poems seldom claimed to be distinguished poetry, whereas Campion’s lyrics (and the lyrics of many of his contemporaries, including William Shakespeare) do claim to be fine poems as well as good words to accompany good music. As for Campion’s idea of how music should be composed and how the nature of poetry is analogous to the nature of music, there is his statement from the preface to his first Booke of Ayres: “What Epigrams are in Poetrie, the same are Ayres in musicke, then in their chiefe perfection when they are short and well seasoned.”

Even though his technical mastery and art seldom fail, Campion is better read in selection than in his entirety. His poetic world of love is narrow and can become monotonous. Among those poems of Campion most often admired are “When to Her lute Corinna Sings,” “There is a Garden in her face,” “Follow Your Saint, Follow with Accents Sweet,” “I Care Not for these Ladies,” “Shall I Come, sweet Love, to thee?,” “Never love unless You Can Beare With All the Faults of a Man,” “Rose-cheekt Lawra, come,” “When Thou Must Home to Shades of Underground,” and “Harke, all you ladies that do sleep.” Many other poems might be named here, but these provide a fair and wide sample of the poet’s excellence.

Bibliography

Coren, Pamela. “In the Person of Womankind: Female Persona Poems by Campion, Donne, Jonson.” Studies in Philology 98, no. 2 (Spring, 2001): 225-250. Examines Campion’s “A secret love or two, I must confesse” and poems by John Donne and Ben Jonson to describe the different ways in which each of these male poets creates and uses a female voice.

Davis, Walter R. Thomas Campion. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Provides information on Campion’s life and reputation as well as discussion of his poetry, music, and masques. Thorough and accessible; an excellent resource for readers beginning the study of Campion’s works.

Eldridge, Muriel T. Thomas Campion: His Poetry and Music (1567-1620). New York: Vantage Press, 1971. Straightforward examination of Campion begins with a brief introduction to English poetry before 1600. Includes information on Campion’s life as well as discussion of his poetry and music.

Kastendieck, Miles Merwin. England’s Musical Poet: Thomas Campion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. One of the first studies of Campion’s poetry to consider the importance of the influences of his music.

Lindley, David. Thomas Campion. New York: Brill, 1986. Comprehensive work examines Campion’s poetry, music, and court masques. Pays special attention to Campion’s metrical theories and the relationships between his poetry and his music.

Ryding, Erik S. In Harmony Framed: Musical Humanism, Thomas Campion, and the Two Daniels. Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Northeast Missouri State University, 1993. Explores why Campion’s theoretical writings favor unrhymed quantitative verse, whereas his own poetry is nearly all rhymed. Includes an interesting chapter on his lyric poetry.