THOMAS CAMPION
Shakespeare happened; he towers so high that most who shared the world with him are dwarfed by his sheer scale. The poets that suffer least are the most specialized. Beside the Giant, I set one of the smallest perfections in the tradition.
“The world,” wrote Thomas Campion, doctor, poet, and musician, “is made by symmetry and proportion, and is in that respect compared to music, and music to poetry.” Campion’s poetry was liked at court and circulated beyond its confines. In the middle of the seventeenth century it dropped out of sight. It was not recovered until 1887, when A. H. Bullen issued the first collected edition. Campion hadn’t played his immortality cards very cleverly. A disciple of Sidney, fascinated by classical meters, he published his Observations in the Art of English Poesie, attacking rhyme and experimenting in classical forms, in 1602, a decade after the controversy had blown over (the cause defeated). He wrote masques, the most transient of literary forms. (Apart from Comus, how many masques can you name?) His art does not require music, but it seems to: the poems are songs, many of which he set himself, and as musical styles changed, they too disappeared.
One is put in mind of the miniature art of Nicholas Hilliard, the Elizabethan goldsmith turned painter whose tiny, brilliant images brought noble contemporaries intimately alive. Hilliard evolved his art of “limning” out of the residual medieval art of manuscript illumination, a source of our portrait art. His is not art for common men, it is not useful—you cannot hang his pictures or integrate them into tapestries. It’s an art to be valued in aesthetic terms alone. One must hold it close to the eye, or wear it about the neck: art as token. Campion’s best songs are more “public” than that: they are not made exclusively for intimate occasions. But they are useless: they do not satirize, render thanks, flatter or praise. The love they invoke is unattributable, their seasons archetypal.
See how the morning smiles
On her bright eastern hills
And with soft steps beguiles
Them that lie slumbering still.
The music-loving birds are come
From cliffs and rocks unknown,
To see the trees and briars bloom
That late were overflown.
He was almost anonymous, though people sang his songs and knew the best of them by heart. Little information survives about Campion’s life. He was born probably in London (possibly in Essex) in 1567. His father, a clerk of the court of Chancery, died when the boy was nine. His mother remarried but died when he was thirteen. His stepfather sent him to Peterhouse, Cambridge, but he left at the age of seventeen without taking a degree. He entered Gray’s Inn, London, in 1586. There is no evidence that he ever practiced law, and in verse he expresses a mild distaste for the profession. How he earned a living before 1605 is unknown. In that year he qualified in medicine at the University of Caen and thereafter probably practiced as a physician in London. With several other writers patronized by the Howards or their retainers, he was implicated in the notorious case of the slow murder by poison of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower. Overbury opposed the marriage of his patron, Franȧs Howard, with the divorced Countess of Essex. Campion remained faithful to Thomas Monson, who took the rap on the Howards’ behalf, attending him during his imprisonment and dedicating a book to him on his release. Campion died in 1620, leaving all he had to his close friend the lutenist Philip Rosseter, with whom he composed many of his songs and airs and collaborated on books. His estate was valued at £22.
Campion first appeared in public as the figure of “Melancholy” in a masque in 1588. But “Content” was the pseudonym under which his first poems were published in Thomas Newman’s careless 1591 edition of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. His early work is “out of” Sidney. The first volume of poems under his own name was Thomae Campiani Poemata (1595), including a minor epic about the defeat of the Armada, elegies, epigrams and Ovidian fragments, all in Latin. In 1601, with Rosseter, he published in English A Book of Ayres, those “superfluous blossoms” of his “deeper studies.” He spent the concluding two decades of his life writing airs, lyrics, masques and prose treatises, one against rhyme, which elicited Samuel Daniel’s spirited defense, and one on counterpoint that was often reprinted down to Charles II’s reign.
“What Epigrams are in Poetry, the same are Ayres in Music, then in their chief perfection when they are short and well seasoned.” This peremptory definition is fitting: an “ayre” is a poem sung by solo voice with, in Campion’s case, a harmonized accompaniment, “skilfully framed, and naturally expressed.” Unlike other writers of airs, Campion often composed words and music, achieving correspondences between the mediums. The air conventions were as strict as those for madrigals. The poems, taken apart from the music, appeal most to what Campion’s editor W. R. Davis calls the “auditory imagination.” There is little vital imagery. No English poet—not even Herrick—had a nicer sense of vowel values or of the force of monosyllables.
As a Latin epigrammatist second only to Sir Thomas More, Campion turned his attention to classical meters and their use in English. He believed them more “ayreable” than accentual meters. Sidney inspired his Observations and experiments in classical meters. The Observations are elliptical, sometimes obscure, and cover ground explored by Roger Ascham and Thomas Watson in the previous century, and by Drant, who influenced Spenser and Harvey. The argument against rhyme and for an alien prosody was exhausted. He revived it as argument, practicing it only in a few illustrations. His dimeters have authority:
Yet not all the glebe
His tough hands manured
Now one turf affords
His poor funeral.
Thus still needy lives,
Thus still needy dies
Th’ unknown multitude.
His contribution to the debate was to identify quantity with accent, at the same time positioning the accent according to classical rules. He sought a rationale for his system in English itself. “We must esteem our syllables as we speak, not as we write, for the sound of them in verse is to be valued, and not their letters.”
Samuel Daniel’s Defense of Rhyme (1603) answers Campion on patriotic grounds, but makes the valid point that Campion frequently dresses up the iambic, so natural to English, in new names and pretends it is something rich and strange. The virtue of Observations is local. There are points of perfect clarity. A caesura is “the natural breathing place” in the line. Campion hears rather than reads poetry. His case against rhyme is worth attending to. Rhyme distorts the work of many poets: “It enforceth a man oftentimes to abjure his matter, and extend a short conceit beyond all bounds of art.”
The publication in 1613 of Campion’s “Songs of Mourning” for the death of Prince Henry (of whom every poet seems to have had high hopes), was preceded by Two Books of Ayres, the first of Divine and Moral Songs, the second Light Conceits of Lovers. In 1614 appeared his treatise on music, A New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counterpoint. He expended much effort on masques, and the images in his verse have some of the brittle sharpness of masque properties. The poems are sparse in physical particularity: their effect depends on prosodic virtuosity. Few poets used a greater variety of stanza forms to such effect, within a narrow range of diction, allusion and theme.
Campion requires close attention; his work vanishes if you stand at a distance from it. Anyone reading him should try to hear at least some of the airs and consider the precision of his musical structures; in performance he organizes the musicians like syllables in an elaborate stanza. The masque he wrote for Lord Hays’s wedding in 1607, presented before the king in Whitehall, used all the resources of the King’s Music. He arranged the musicians carefully in groups: “On the right hand were consorted ten musicians, with bass and mean lutes, a bandora, a double sackbut, and an harpsichord, with two treble violins; on the other side... were placed nine violins and three lutes; and to answer both the consorts (as it were in a triangle) six cornets and six chapel voices were seated almost right against them, in a place higher in respect of the piercing sound of those instruments.” He marshals syllables with similar consideration and precision.
In his Latin poems he acknowledges a debt to Chaucer. More tangible debts are to Wyatt, Surrey and Sidney, and to the Latin poets. The poems fall into four general categories: amorous laments (and rare celebrations of love); (not very) wanton and witty fancies; devotional poems; and frank declarations of love. His natural world is not the world of nature: it is Arcadia, a masque setting with nymphs and shepherds. We must accept this convention; if we do, we hear a clear personal note and sometimes glimpse a solid reality. Invention in sound, balanced syllables, manipulation of rhythm and rhyme, attempts to give vowels “convenient liberty,” juxtaposition of stanzas with similar syntax and rhythmic progression but contrasting emotional content—such techniques create the effects. Many lines have an odd number of syllables and begin with a stress, an effect required by the music.
The enjambement serves the meticulous craftsman well. Yvor Winters singles out one example to illustrate a general point:
Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the ayrie towers.
The suspension of syntax at the end of the first and third lines suggests two possible directions for the meaning. The following line takes up one meaning, but the second remains active in our mind—and in the poet’s. He takes it up later. “Enlarge” can mean increase in number or increase in space. It is number the poet means, but space is suggested and developed in the last stanza. Such effects give the poem aural and intellectual point. It is on a small scale, but carried out with the assurance of a craftsman, one of the most brilliant in the language.
At the opening of the Fourth Book of Ayres (1617), Campion describes his lyric art: “The apothecaries have books of gold, whose leaves being opened are so light as that they are subject to be shaken with the least breath and yet rightly handled, they serve both for ornament and use; such are light ayres.” It would be hard to find poems more perfect in form than “When to her lute Corinna sings,” “Follow thy fair sun,” “The man of life upright,” “To music bent is my retired mind,” “Fire, fire, fire, fire!,” “There is a garden in her face”—with or without music. Even in his day Campion must have seemed a bit archaic and refined. Marlowe, Jonson and Donne were contemporaries. Their world was beyond his grasp—or his interest. In his field, however, Campion is nearly incomparable.