Poem of the week

My Sweetest Lesbia by Thomas Campion

A poem inspired by Catullus this week, but Thomas Campion’s version of Carmen V, My Sweetest Lesbia, is far more than a translation

The lute on which passion plays … detail from The Lute Player by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

Thomas Campion belongs to that fascinating tradition of medically-trained poets, the analysis of which deserves a book rather than a blog. He was born in London in 1567, left Cambridge without a degree, briefly studied law, but ultimately graduated from the University of Caen with an MD. After practising medicine in London he later returned to the continent as a gentleman-soldier. He is believed to have died of the plague in London in 1620.

The Romance languages he heard and read must surely have contributed to the training of his poetic “ear”. He was not simply a melodist but an experimenter; part of the poetic movement which was then seeking to adapt quantitative measure to the English line. All the same, he is rightly considered to be the most flawless lyricist of the Elizabethan poets. No lutenist or madrigal choir is needed: his “airs” sing from the page. He was himself a composer and he collaborated with other composers. In his Preface to the Reader from P Rossiter’s 1601 Book of Ayres, he declared “What epigrams are in poetry, the same are airs in music, then in their chief perfection when they were short.” Within the relative brevity, and alongside the mellifluous cadence, Campion does more than make music: he shows us nuanced, often painful, always convincing human emotions. His poetry is the lute on which “passion” plays. As he says in “Corinna”, “For when of pleasure she does sing, / My thoughts enjoy a sudden spring; / But if she doth of sorrow speak, / Even from my heart the strings do break.”

This week’s poem, “My Sweetest Lesbia”, is sometimes described as a translation. Its inspiration is the Latin poet Catullus’s poem, Carmen V, which begins “Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus”. Campion opens, more or less, with Catullus’s first six lines. But his goal is to turn the poem into a song – a strophic song with a refrain. He soon departs from the Latin. Catullus’s erotic crescendo (“Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred / then another thousand, then a second hundred … “) completely disappears. Instead, Campion takes from the Latin poem the antithetical ideas of brief light and never-ending night, and weaves them into a refrain, delicately varied at each appearance.

Delicacy is the key to this poem. Campion’s lines are not typically uniform, and the beauty of his rhythm often lies in the variation of line-length. However, within this poem’s uniform lines, his syntax creates similarly graceful, if lighter, pauses. The iambic pentameter treads on tiptoe. Delicacy for Campion is not wafty poetic fragility, but a habit of mind – shown in the wit and tact which move him delightfully to turn Catullus’s “senum” (“old men”) into “the sager sort”. But admittedly the poem’s tone is on the sombre side: if Carmen V was a Song of Innocence, this is a Song of Experience.

I don’t suppose “My Sweetest Lesbia” has even been included in an anti-war anthology, but it embodies a pacifist statement: it pits the hedonist’s sensible and simple argument against “fools” who “waste their little light / And seek with pain the ever-during night”. Campion, we remember, knew battlefields first-hand, and, as a doctor, he may well have closed the eyes of the dead.

The conclusion is hardly straightforward. Is the speaker asking Lesbia to close his eyes and then kiss him? Is it her memory of him that will “crown” his love? The “little light” seems full of possible metaphor, too. That Arcadian image of the celebrating lovers and their “sweet pastimes” at the tomb-side seems to take a graceful turn from artifice into generous humanity. The speaker is giving life and love permission to continue without him – and possibly to continue for Lesbia.

It is Campion’s wonderful art to be seriously playful. Catullus is playful, too, but more intense; the Elizabethan keeps lusty defiance in check. “My Sweetest Lesbia” is only partly a carpe diem poem. It moves us because it celebrates love without begging or bragging, and because of the pathos of its minor key; its unconsoled, recurring awareness of that “ever-during night”.

My Sweetest Lesbia

My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,
And, though the sager sort our deeds reprove,
Let us not weigh them: heaven’s great lamps do dive
Into their west, and straight again revive,
But, soon as once set is our little light,
Then must we sleep one ever-during night.

If all would lead their lives in love like me,
Then bloody swords and armour should not be,
No drum nor trumpet peaceful sleeps should move,
Unless alarm came from the camp of love:
But fools do live, and waste their little light,
And seek with pain their ever-during night.

When timely death my life and fortune ends,
Let not my hearse be vexed with mourning friends,
But let all lovers, rich in triumph come,
And with sweet pastimes grace my happy tomb;
And, Lesbia, close up thou my little light,
And crown with love my ever-during night.

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Full article and photo: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/22/poem-week-sweetest-lesbia-campion

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See also:

Catullus, Carmen V

Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus inuidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.