"Drink to me only with thine eyes": Ben Jonson's Lyrics

Today, we'll wrap up our Jonsonian mini-series by looking at some his lyrics, including poems from the 1616 Works and songs from his plays.  If you'd like to read along, just ask Uncle Google to serve up these titles:

"On Something, that Walks Somewhere"
"On My First Daughter"
"On My First Son"
"Song: To Celia"
"Still to be Neat"

Additional music from Internet Archive:
"Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" perf. Paul Robeson, 1938.
"In Town Tonight" by Eric Coates, perf. Reginald Dixon.

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• 14:02 (Cont.) "Drink to me only with thine eyes": Ben Jonson's Lyrics

Transcript

Welcome back to the Classic English Literature Podcast, the show that explains why I was so unpopular in high school.  This show also gives rhyme its reason and today – after something of a hiatus from the poetic idiom – we return to the genre invoked in our little tagline.  I want to finish up this mini-series of episodes on Ben Jonson by looking at his lyric verse.

Before we kick off, allow me to draw your attention to that little tab on your phone under the episode’s title that says “send us a text!”  That’s the Fan Mail feature, so feel free to shoot me a message with your thoughts, questions, or swanning compliments.  The other button says “Support the Show,” and that’s a good one if you would like to make a small donation to help keep the show going.  I would certainly appreciate anything you can do.  

I have mentioned Ben Jonson’s heroic self-regard in publishing a folio edition of his Works in 1616, a move of such audacious self-promotion that he suffered the slings and arrows of his peers’ contempt.  Further exasperating Jacobean elite was the inclusion of drama in the volume, rather than presenting exclusively the more seriously-considered poetry.  And while readers today, if they know Jonson at all know him for his comedies, we must acknowledge that old Ben had rather a nice touch with lyric.  In that folio, he grouped the lyrics into discrete sections, which he called “Epigrams” and “The Forest.”  In a later second edition of the Works, he added a third titled “Underwood,” though this was published posthumously in 1641, he having inconveniently died in 1637.

It is from the epigrams that his best known poems are drawn.  A word about the title of this section.  Diligent students that you are, I know you have already raced to your glossary of literary terms and looked up the definition of epigrams, and you’ve found that an epigram is a brief poem, often less than half a dozen lines, usually quite witty, can be satirical with an edge of personal invective, and finishes off with an ingeniously twisty ending.  “Oh, boy!” you exclaim, rubbing your hands and licking your chops, “we’re in for top-shelf Jonson snark here!”

In a poem called “On Something, That Walks Somewhere,” Jonson is witheringly dismissive of a courtly fop.

At court I met it, in clothes brave enough,

To be a courtier ;  and looks grave enough,

To seem a statesman :  as I near it came,

It made me a great face ;  I ask'd the name.

A Lord, it cried, buried in flesh, and blood,

And such from whom let no man hope least good,

For I will do none ;  and as little ill,

For I will dare none :  Good Lord, walk dead still.

In eight lines of iambic pentameter couplets, Jonson expresses a clear resentment of the leisured classes.  The speaker comes across a courtier, whom he regards immediately as subhuman – an “it.”  The courtier is dressed in “clothes brave enough to be a courtier.”  The word “brave” is a curious choice, denoting as it does courage, but connoting a sense of quality or luxury.  So he’s dressed well enough (with a hint of “enough” as “just barely”) to be a courtier.  But interestingly, the sentence is enjambed, that is, it runs over the end of the pentameter line, which ends with enough.  So, we can read the first line as focusing on the fine costume of this man, but the second line undercuts the sense of the sentence.  Same thing with the enjambment over lines two and three, commenting on the courtier’s serious, statesmanlike mien, though again, just barely. Jonson repeats “enough” as the end rhyme.

When the speaker asks his name, the haughty peacock only replies “A lord!” as if a name should be less important than a rank to such a precocious commoner.  Then the lord declares something of a personal credo, which I always do when introduced to a stranger.  He says he is a lord from whom no man should expect the least good or little ill, for he will “dare none.”  The dare ironically undercuts the brave of line one.  So, he’s a lord from which no man should expect anything – and since we’ve no proper name, perhaps Jonson’s speaker thinks that’s what should be expected of any upjumped cupbearer.  It’s an “it,” after all.  Jonson ends the poem with the ambiguous “Good lord, walk dead still.”  Is this a cry of exasperation?  Good lord!  Or an imperative address: Good my lord . . .  And what does “walk dead still” mean?  Remain motionless?  Stop flouncing about?  Or does “still” mean, as it could have in the early 17th century, “always.”  Or does it mean something like the far more earthy “Eff off and die?”

Anyway, that’s the kind of thing epigrams do.  Jonson does serve up a gut-busting helping of celebrity roast, but these are not really his best work.  He uses the term epigram far more liberally, and the poems that deserve the attention of a general readership show a complimentary and tender side to the great bear.  He includes a pious sonnet in rhyming couplets to his former schoolmaster, William Camden, and one of quite lofty praise to priest and fellow poet John Donne, whom we will study in the fullness of time. 

But probably the two most famous poems from the Epigrams are memorials to Jonson’s lost children: “On My First Daughter,” on the death of his six-month old daughter Mary in 1593, and “On My First Son,” for the death of his seven year old namesake ten years later.  

The first poem, marking the death of his daughter, attempts a kind of stoicism in the face of loss.  Jonson writes:

Here lies, to each her parents’ ruth,

Mary, the daughter of their youth;

Yet all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due,

It makes the father less to rue.

At six months’ end she parted hence

With safety of her innocence;

Whose soul heaven’s queen, whose name she bears,

In comfort of her mother’s tears,

Hath placed amongst her virgin-train:

Where, while that severed doth remain,

This grave partakes the fleshly birth;

Which cover lightly, gentle earth!

The poem is an apostrophe to the earth – the dirt or dust which composes the baby’s grave.  We don’t realize this until the last line; till then, it seems a solitary rumination or perhaps an address to an unknown listener.  The metrical line eschews the stately pentameter of most of Jonson’s verse, both dramatic and nondramatic, and instead uses a tetrameter or octosyllabic line.  We are familiar with such a rhythm because it dominates much popular music, which is where, I presume, most people now hear poetry in the form of song lyrics.  Depending on the context, it can sound folksy or rustic, perhaps a levelling down of the mighty pentameter.  Here, though, I think it contributes to a more personal and intimate feeling – this feels whispered.  One could perhaps make the case that, when combined with the couplet rhyme scheme, the meter offers also a tone more juvenile – childlike rather than childish – akin to a nursery rhyme, the kind of thing hummed over the living baby’s cradle.

But of course the tone and context here is much darker and more sorrowful, despite the speaker’s struggle to square his loss with divine justice.  This little eulogy is mostly iambic, but Jonson occasionally deploys trochees to upset the rhythm.  A trochee, you might recall, is the opposite foot to the iamb.  Whereas the iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one – which gives a sense of uplift or rising – the trochee is a stressed syllable followed by one unstressed, with the attendant feeling of falling or decline.  I think it is most effectively used here in the first foot of the second line, when the father names his lost baby girl: Mary.  The trochee allows us to feel the breath going out of him, an expirant sigh of grief, the name driving home the reality of her death.

He attempts to find peace with that reality by saying: “Yet all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due,” a revision of Job’s admonition to his wife during his suffering: “the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.”  But while the Biblical sufferer concludes by blessing the name of the Lord, Jonson’s sufferer only says he should therefore regret her loss less.  He then speaks of her intact innocence, that is, she died sinless and so is guaranteed salvation as a handmaiden to the Virgin Mary, whose name the child shares (the poem was probably written during the late 1590s, some years after the child’s death, when Jonson had converted to Catholicism).  The poem concludes echoing God’s judgment on Adam in Genesis, informing the man that he shall “return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”  Jonson’s speaker commits only his child’s body to the earth, for her soul persists in heaven: This grave partakes the fleshly birth; / Which cover lightly, gentle earth!”

A decade following Mary’s passing, Jonson lost another child, his son, to an outbreak of plague.  The fatherly anguish and strained acceptance of divine will mirror the previous poem, but there are some notable differences in tone and perspective.  Here’s the text:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.

Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I lose all father now! For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,

And if no other misery, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."

For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

“On My First Son,” like its companion piece, takes the form of an apostrophe, but this time the grieving father addresses the dead directly.  Jonson uses the first- and second-person voice almost exclusively, as opposed to the third-person in “On My First Daughter.”  This has led many readers and critics to conclude that the loss of the boy meant more to him than that of a girl.  They also note that Mary died at only six months, while Ben (the boy was named for his father) lived until he was seven.  There is a pernicious bit of historical postulating that medieval and early modern parents felt the loss of infants barely at all, given the harsh realities of childhood mortality of the time.  This is, of course, patently untrue – one need merely consult the volumes of verse, epitaphs, and letters from the period to know that bereavement is a human constant.  Furthermore, some under-nuanced interpreters have sought to impose a sexist or patriarchal paradigm upon the poems, arguing that Jonson saw his daughter as somehow more dispensible than his son.  I find that appalling.  How dare they impose their crude political frameworks upon a real man’s real heartache?

Jonson returns to his usual iambic pentameter line, employing heroic couplets.  Like “On My First Daughter,” he strives to find some explanation for the tragedy in the mysterious workings of heaven: “Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay, / Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.”  This line, I should point out, is a hexameter one – six feet, 12 syllables.  The “thee pay” runs over the traditional line length as if in confirmation of materiality of death in a bartering, economic metaphor.  It feels too much.  Taken on its own, “thee pay” may also be read ambiguously: in the sense of the line, “thee” is the object of the verb “pay,”but I suppose one could jigger the case of the pronoun and almost read it as the son paying.  Maybe I’m being too liberal here.  But then he wails his regret at having been a father, not only for his own grief but for the suffering his fatherhood brought to his son.  A rhetorical question follows: 

For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,

And if no other misery, yet age?

That his child escaped further suffering offers cold comfort.  We then get probably the most famous passage in the poem, when the speaker (and I think it safe to say that Jonson himself is the speaker) declares that young Ben was his father’s “best piece of poetry.”  Parenthood as authorship is a curious analogy, both presumably an expression of one’s deepest essence, but that may be an anachronistically Romantic notion.  Nevertheless, it doesn’t feel too out of place here.  After all, the poem begins, “Farewell, thou child of my right hand.”  Perhaps there’s a pun on “right,” and it’s also worth pointing out that, etymologically, the name Benjamin means literally  in Hebrew and Arabic “son of the right hand” and it’s related to the verb meaning “to build” or “to make” and to the noun for “stone.”  Interesting connection to the family’s bricklaying business there.  

Yet I must confess that this metaphor – child as poem – also strikes me as a bit, well, too self-pitying.  I mean, it confirms a lingering sense in the verse that the focus is really on Jonson and not on the dead boy.  Not that a father has no right to contemplate his own loss, but that loss seems to center on Jonson’s own position.  He says in line 2: “my sin was too much hope of thee,” and in line 5: “O that I could lose all father now!”  Taken together with the poem’s last lines, in which Jonson refers to himself in the third-person: “henceforth all his vows be such, / As what he loves may never like too much,” I sometimes find the poem too strident in its forced dispassion.  Like, I hurt so much because I loved you, and I shouldn’t make that mistake again.  It’s an understandable sentiment from one in the depths of anguish, but it could be read as a will to emotional deadness.

Let’s move on to something more cheery, shall we?  Those two little poems were quite heavy.  A couple of weeks ago, I popped a little video on the antisocial medias of a reading of Jonson’s “Song to Celia,” which is a little mash-up of a handful of Greek sophist Philostratus’s writings from the 3rd century that first appeared in “The Forest” section of Jonson’s Works.  Since about the 18th-century, when the poem was set to music, it has apparently become quite a well-worn tavern song, though I admit that I’ve never heard it in any of the bars in which I misspent my youth.  At any rate, it opens with perhaps Jonson’s best known lines.  See if you recognize them:

Drink to me only with thine eyes,

         And I will pledge with mine;

Or leave a kiss but in the cup,

         And I’ll not look for wine.

The thirst that from the soul doth rise

         Doth ask a drink divine;

But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,

         I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,

         Not so much honouring thee

As giving it a hope, that there

         It could not withered be.

But thou thereon didst only breathe,

         And sent’st it back to me;

Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,

         Not of itself, but thee.

You’ll hear that opening line – “drink to me only with thine eyes” – in any number of recordings and movies, by, among others, Bing Crosby, Paul Robeson, and Johnny Cash.  The poem is in two stanzas which relate to separate, but not unrelated, instances between the putative lovers.  The meter alternates between tetrameter and trimeter lines, very song-like.  In the first stanza, the speaker eschews wine-drinking for the pleasure of drinking in his beloved’s gaze.  A kiss from her surpasses the pleasure of wine, yea, even surpasses the nectar of Jove himself!  Sidebar – some later versions of the song replace Jove with love, but that seems nonsensical, doesn’t it?  

Anyway, a pretty good pick-up line, I’d say.  Who wouldn’t melt at that?  Well, she wouldn’t, apparently.  Wow, these beloveds in Renaissance verse are quite hard to please, aren’t they?  Seems this guy sent her some flowers, a wreath, reckoning it would not only honor her, but that her presence would perpetuate its blooming vitality.  But, she gives it a sniff and sends it back.  Rude!  Unless she’s allergic – that would dampen the romantic impulse.  But he still has it, and indeed it thrives, but it’s perfume is no longer its own, but hers.

Give him credit for stick-to-it-iveness.  Or bloody-minded stupidity.  

For the sake of symmetry – I love a bit of symmetry – let’s round off this show with a look at one last poem, bit of a snarky one like “Something that Walks” in which Jonson once again disparages the privileged class with the barely concealed resentment of a member of the lower sorts who aspires to acceptance by the patriciate.  This one’s a song, too, and it’s sung during a play called Epicene, or The Silent Woman, a comedy in which a man named Dauphine tries to swindle his uncle Morose by having him marry a cross-dressing boy.  Ah, hilarious.  By the by, it was performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels, one of those boys theatre companies I mentioned in some other episode somewhere.

Anyway, to the song: “Still to be Neat”:

Still to be neat, still to be dressed,

As you were going to a feast;

Still to be powdered, still perfumed; 

Lady, it is to be presumed,

Though art's hid causes are not found,

All is not sweet, all is not sound.

Give me a look, give me a face,

That makes simplicity a grace;

Robes loosely flowing, hair as free;

Such sweet neglect more taketh me

Than all th'adulteries of art. 

They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.

As you can see, we’re back to Jonson’s epigrammatic idiom.  The speaker chastises a courtly woman doting on her own appearance: always made up, always overdressed.  Like Hamlet’s revulsion at Ophelia’s use of cosmetics, the speaker takes the beautiful and artificial exterior to indicate something corrupt or false inside.  

Why should one assume that?  No one ever bothers to explain.  “The whited sepulchre” argument is always offered as self-evident.

Then the speaker praises the unaffected beauty of natural simplicity, complete with loose flowing robes and hair – the insouciant charm of “sweet neglect.”  That is what strikes his heart: dirty hippies.

To all hippies who might be tuning in, allow me to say that I don’t think all of you are dirty.  Though I would like to recommend that some of you reconsider the hygiene products you purchase from the co-op.  Sometimes “all natural” is merely marketing speak for “entirely ineffective.”  Word to the wise.

But why should she care?  Why would she give a flamingo’s fart about what he prefers in a woman?  Is he just offering this advice unsolicited?  If so, he’s a presumptuous old windbag.  I’m speaking, of course, of the poem here as a stand-alone text, the way most people read it, not in the context of the play, where other ironies abound.  Of course, we can also see that the poem, while taking female beauty as its instance, may be making larger comments about art in general, art as artifice, the opposite of nature.  Concerns about this potential opposition will come to play a major role in the intellectual and aesthetic movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but we’ll leave that discussion to its proper time.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of the Classic English Literature Podcast.  If you have, please take a moment to leave a 5 star rating and review wherever you listen – that raises the show’s profile and makes more folks aware of it.  Think about making a small donation if you can; tell everyone you know about the sterling work done here.  Be well, do good, and you’ll hear from me soon.