The Penguin Book of English Song Read online

  The relationship between music and words was much debated during the Renaissance. Monteverdi, for example, argued that the text should be the ‘master’ rather than the ‘servant’ of the music; and Sir Frederick, speaking in Castiglione’s Cortegiano, fulminates against the way in which the music in madrigals drowns the poetry. Campion’s view, expressed in the quotation at the head of this chapter, speaks for parity – in the same way that William Blake, two centuries later, combined the arts of poet and illustrator in his Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

  In his Two Bookes of Ayres (c.1613), Campion writes that the ayres are ‘to be sung to the Lute and Viols, in two, three, and foure Parts: or by one Voyce to an INSTRUMENT’. Campion, like his older contemporary Nicholas Hilliard (c.1547–1619), was a miniaturist. His themes might be limited, but his prosodic virtuosity is extraordinary, and some of these poems strike unforgettably at the heart.

  JOHN DOWLAND

  I must complaine (1603)1

  I must complaine, yet do enioy my loue,

  She is too faire, too rich in beauties parts:

  Thence is my griefe for nature while she stroue

  With all her graces and deuinest artes,

  To forme her too too beautifull of hue,

  She had no leisure left to make her true.

  Should I agrieu’d then wish she were lesse faire,

  That were repugnant to my owne desires,

  She is admir’d, new suters still repaire,

  That kindles dayly loues forgetfull fires,1

  Rest iealous thoughts, and thus resolue at last,

  She hath more beautie then becomes the chast.

  (Campion)

  THOMAS CAMPION: from Philip Rosseter’s A Booke of Ayres (1601)

  I care not for these Ladies

  I care not for these Ladies

  That must be woode and praide,

  Giue me kind Amarillis1

  The wanton countrey2 maide,

  Nature art disdaineth,

  Her beautie is her owne,

  Her when we court and kisse,

  She cries forsooth let go,

  But when we come where comfort is,

  She neuer will say no.

  If I loue Amarillis,

  She giues me fruit and flowers,

  But if we loue these Ladies,

  We must giue golden showers,

  Giue them gold that sell loue,

  Giue me the Nutbrowne lasse,

  Who when we court and kisse,

  She cries forsooth let go,

  But when we come where comfort is,

  She neuer will say no.

  These Ladies must haue pillowes,

  And beds by strangers wrought,

  Giue me a Bower of willowes,

  Of mosse and leaues vnbought,

  And fresh Amarillis,

  With milke and honie fed,

  Who when we court and kisse,

  She cries forsooth let go,

  But when we come where comfort is,

  She neuer will say no.

  The Sypres1 curten of the night

  The Sypres curten of the night is spread,

  And ouer all a silent dewe is cast,

  The weaker cares by sleepe are conquered,

  But I alone with hidious griefe, agast.

  In spite of Morpheus charmes a watch doe keepe

  Ouer mine eies to banish carelesse sleepe.

  Yet oft my trembling eyes through faintnes close,

  And then the Mappe of hell before me stands,

  Which Ghosts doe see, and I am one of those,

  Ordain’d to pine in sorrowes endles bands,

  Since from my wretched soule all hopes are reft,

  And now no cause of life to me is left.

  Griefe ceaze2 my soule, for that will still endure,

  When my cras’d3 bodie is consum’d and gone,

  Beare it to thy blacke denne, there keepe it sure,

  Where thou ten thousand soules doest tyre4 vpon,

  Yet all doe not affoord such foode to thee,

  As this poore one, the worser part of mee.

  THOMAS CAMPION: from Two Bookes of Ayres (c. 1613)

  Neuer weather-beaten Saile1

  Neuer weather-beaten Saile more willing bent to shore,

  Neuer tyred Pilgrims limbs affected2 slumber more;

  Then my weary spright3 now longs to flye out of my troubled brest.

  O come quickly sweetest Lord, and take my soule to rest.

  Euer-blooming are the ioyes of Heau’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.

  (Corp, Parry)

  ROGER QUILTER: from Seven Elizabethan Lyrics, Op. 12 (1908)

  Come, O come my lifes delight

  [My life’s delight] (1907)

  Come, O come my lifes delight;

  Let me not in langour pine:

  Loue loues no delay: thy sight,

  The more enioy’d, the more diuine.

  O come and take from mee

  The paine of being depriu’d of thee.

  Thou all sweetnesse dost enclose,

  Like a little world of blisse:

  Beauty guards thy lookes, the Rose

  In them pure and eternall is.

  Come then and make thy flight

  As swift to me as heau’nly light.

  THOMAS DEKKER

  (?1570–1632)

  O sweetest heart of all thy time save one,

  Star seen for love’s sake nearest to the sun,

  Hung lamplike o’er a dense and doleful city,

  Not Shakespeare’s very spirit, howe’er more great,

  Than thine toward man was more compassionate,

  Nor gave Christ praise from lips more sweet with pity.

  ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE: ‘Thomas Decker’

  Dekker was a prolific writer of plays and pamphlets. Never wealthy, he lived a hand-to-mouth existence and was never financially secure. Little is known about him until 1597, when he was already working for the theatre-manager Philip Henslowe, for whom he wrote some forty-four plays, usually in collaboration with others. Some of his collaborators are Henry Chettle (Patient Grissil), Thomas Middleton (The Honest Whore and The Roaring Girl), John Webster (Westward Ho!) and John Ford (The Witch of Edmonton). Jonson satirized him in The Poetaster (1601), and Dekker responded with Satiromastix, Or the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet (1602). His pamphlets tell us a great deal about contemporary low-life in London. The Wonderful Year (1603) describes the London plagues, The Seven Deadly Sins (1606) portrays the vices and foibles of London citizens, The Bellman of London (1608) catalogues the roguery of Elizabethan con men, and The Gull’s Hornbook (1609) satirizes young dandies. There were two sides to Dekker – the Rabelaisian describer of low life, and the Romantic poet full of tender pathos. He is remembered chiefly for his realistic portrayals of London life, and his masterpiece is probably The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599). The first two poems printed here are from Patient Grissil (1603), a play he wrote with Henry Chettle and William Haughton. Dekker’s sympathy for the underprivileged and dispossessed, evident in so much of his writing, was born of personal experience: as early as 1598 he was forced to borrow money from Henslowe to be released from a debtor’s prison. He was in prison for debt once more from 1612 until 1619, and it seems likely that he died in debt, since his widow renounced her right to administer his estate.

  PETER WARLOCK

  The song

  [Lullaby] (1918/1919)1

  Golden slumbers kisse your eyes,

  Smiles awake you when you rise:

  Sleepe pretty wantons doe not cry,

  And I will sing a lullabie,

  Rocke them rocke them lullabie.

  Care is heauy therefore sleepe you,

  You are care and care must keep you:


  Sleepe pretty wantons do not cry,

  And I will sing a lullabie.

  Rocke them rocke them lullabie.

  (Berners, Howells, McCartney, Somervell, Stanford)

  The song

  [Sweet content] (1919/1920)1

  Art thou poore yet hast thou golden Slumbers:

  Oh sweet content!

  Art thou rich yet is thy minde perplexed?

  Oh punnishment!

  Dost thou laugh to see how fooles are vexed?

  To ad to golden numbers, golden numbers.

  O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!

  Worke apace, apace, apace, apace:

  Honest labour beares a louely face,

  Then hey noney, noney: hey noney, noney!

  Canst drinke the waters of the Crisped spring?

  O sweet content!

  Swim’st thou in wealth, yet sinck’st in thine owne teares?

  O punnishment!

  Then hee that patiently want’s burden beares,

  No burden beares, but is a King, a King!

  O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!

  Worke apace, apace, apace, apace:

  Honest labour beares a louely face,

  Then hey noney noney: hey noney noney!

  (Blumenthal, Davies, Stanford)

  ERNEST MOERAN

  The first Three-man’s song

  [The merry month of May] (1925/1925)1

  O the month of Maie, the merry month of Maie,

  So frolicke2, so gay, and so greene, so greene, so greene:

  O, and then did I, vnto my true loue say,

  Sweete Peg, thou shalt be my Summers Queene.

  Now the Nightingale, the prettie Nightingale,

  The sweetest singer in all the Forrests quier,

  Intreates thee sweete Peggie, to heare thy true loues tale:

  Loe, yonder she sitteth, her breast against a brier.

  But O I spie the Cuckoo, the Cuckoo, the Cuckoo,3

  See where she sitteth, come away my ioy:

  Come away I prithee, I do not like the Cuckoo

  Should sing where my Peggie and I kisse and toy.

  O the month of Maie, the merry month of Maie,

  So frolike, so gay, and so greene, so greene, so greene:

  And then did I, vnto my true loue say,

  Sweete Peg, thou shalt be my Summers Queene.

  (Ireland)

  The second Three-man’s song

  [Troll the bowl!] (1925/1925)1

  Cold’s the wind, and wet’s the raine,

  Saint Hugh2 be our good speede:

  Ill is the weather that bringeth no gaine,

  Nor helpes good hearts in neede.

  Trowle3 the boll, the iolly Nut-browne4 boll,

  And here kind mate to thee:

  Let’s sing a dirge for Saint Hughes soule,

  And downe it merrily.

  Downe a downe, hey downe a downe,

  Hey derie derie down a down, Close with the tenor boy.5

  Ho well done, to me let come,

  Ring compasse gentle ioy.6

  Trowle the boll, the Nut-browne boll,

  And here kind &c. as often as there be men to drinke.

  At last when all haue drunke, this verse.

  Cold’s the wind, and wet’s the raine,

  Saint Hugh be our good speede:

  Ill is the weather that bringeth no gaine,

  Nor helpes good hearts in neede.

  JOHN DONNE

  (1572–1631)

  Since I am comming to that Holy roome,

  Where, with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,

  I shall be made thy Musique; As I come

  I tune the Instrument here at the dore,

  And what I must doe then, thinke here before.

  JOHN DONNE: from ‘Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse’

  Donne’s father was an ironmonger (hence, perhaps, the frequent references to metallurgy and alchemy in his poetry) and his mother the daughter of John Heywood, the dramatist. She was also a relative of Sir Thomas More, and brought Donne up as a Catholic. He studied in Oxford at Hart Hall (later Hertford College), favoured by Catholics because it possessed no chapel, which would have attracted the attention of the Protestant authorities. His religion debarred him from taking a degree, and after a period of travel on the continent he entered Lincoln’s Inn in 1592. In 1593 his younger brother Henry was arrested for harbouring a Catholic priest, and died in prison. It was about this time that Donne renounced his Catholic faith. He sailed with Essex on the Cadiz expedition of 1596, and with Ralegh in 1597 to hunt for Spanish treasure in the Azores. During the latter voyage he sent his verse-letters, ‘The Calm’ and ‘The Storm’, to Christopher Brooke, a friend at the Inns of Court. Back in London he became chief secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal.

  It was not long before he met Ann More, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Sir George More, Lady Egerton’s brother. He became a Member of Parliament for Brackley (one of Egerton’s pocket boroughs) in 1601. Donne’s secret marriage to Ann More caused him great distress: Ann’s father railed, Donne lost his job, and the couple suffered disgrace and poverty. It was not until 1609 that there was a reconciliation. Donne suffered acute depressions of the mind, and his Biathanatos (1606, but not published till after his death), a partial justification of suicide, probably reflects his own feelings that are wonderfully captured in the melancholy anonymous portrait of the poet, dated c.1595, that hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery. He travelled in Europe during 1605, and eventually settled in Mitcham. Attracted by Dean Morton’s anti-Jesuit writings and still appalled at the fate of his younger brother, he wrote his Pseudo-Martyr, in which he encouraged Catholics to take the oath of allegiance to James. The King, who also approved of Ignatius His Conclave (1611), a satire on the Jesuits, urged Donne to enter the Church. It was at this time that he started to compose the Holy Sonnets, which reflect his own shaken faith. He and his wife now settled in a small house in Drury Lane. She bore him eleven children, and his struggle to support them contributed to the gradual darkening of his mind. He wrote a number of occasional verses to influential individuals, but was not rewarded with any preferment. He took holy orders in January 1615, was appointed a royal chaplain by James I and almost immediately gained a reputation as an exceptional preacher. The following year he was appointed Reader in Divinity at Lincoln’s Inn. He held livings at Keyston, Sevenoaks and Blunham.

  Having settled into his new career, Donne suffered what was perhaps the harshest blow of his life: his wife died at the age of thirty-three, after giving birth to a stillborn son. Izaak Walton, Donne’s first biographer, records that he was henceforth ‘crucified to the world’. In 1619 he spent several months, in the company of Viscount Doncaster, travelling through Germany in an attempt to mediate between the Catholic Emperor of Germany and Protestant subjects in Bohemia. The following year he was made Dean of St Paul’s. As Donne’s health began to fail, he began his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1524), a volume of prayers and meditations, of which the most celebrated, No. 17, begins: ‘Perchance hee for whom this Bell tolls’. (See Rainier’s Cycle for Declamation.) After the death of James I, Donne preached his first sermon before Charles I. As the Plague ravaged London, he moved to more salubrious Chelsea, and wrote increasingly of suffering in his sermons. His health deteriorated and he gave his last sermon – on ‘Death’s Duel’ – before the King on the first Friday of Lent in 1631. He died on 31 March 1631. Walton tells how he had his portrait drawn wearing a shroud and standing on a funeral urn. The sculpture (1631) by Nicholas Stone in St Paul’s Cathedral was made from this painting, and set on foot a macabre fashion for shrouded effigies standing up.

  To many people, Donne was a divided persona: Doctor John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s, one of the greatest preachers of the age; and Jack Donne, the author of vicious satires and some of the most sexually explicit love poems in English. The truth is that on taking holy orders at the age
of forty-three, he re-directed the ardour that had informed his erotic poetry into a fervent quest for union with God. Whereas Donne’s secular poetry often explores his feelings towards women, his religious verse, and especially the Holy Sonnets, express his love for God as a lover might for his mistress, or a woman for her lover – but the self-confidence of the amorous verse is now replaced by a fear of failure.

  The somewhat convoluted syntax of Donne’s poems and the complexity of his metaphysical conceits have limited the number of entirely successful settings of his verse. There were, however, several composers who set his poems during his lifetime or shortly after his death, including Alfonso Ferrabosco II (‘The expiration’), William Corkine (‘Breake of day’ and ‘The baite’ in the Second Booke of Airs, 1612), Thomas Ford (‘Lamentations of Jeremy’ for three voices) and John Coprario (‘The message’). The first collection of his verse was issued in 1633, two years after his death.

  ALFONSO FERRABOSCO II1

  The expiration (1609)

  So, so, leaue off, this last lamenting kisse,

  Which sucks two soules, and vapours2 Both away,

  Turne thou ghost that way, and let mee turne this,

  And let our selues benight3 our happy day,

  We aske none leaue to love, nor will we owe

  Any so cheape a death as saying goe.

  Goe, goe, and if that word haue not quite kild thee,