Today’s Poem: Ask Me No More Where Jove Bestows

Enough with all the questions, honey

Abraham Janssens, Olympus: Jove Rebuked by Venus, circa 1615 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Ask Me No More Where Jove Bestows

by Thomas Carew

Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauty’s orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.

Ask me no more whither do stray
The golden atoms of the day;
For in pure love heaven did prepare
Those powders to enrich your hair.

Ask me no more whither doth haste
The nightingale, when May is past;
For in your sweet dividing throat
She winters, and keeps warm her note.

Ask me no more where those stars ’light,
That downwards fall in dead of night;
For in your eyes they sit, and there
Fixed become, as in their sphere.

Ask me no more if east or west
The phoenix builds her spicy nest;
For unto you at last she flies,
And in your fragrant bosom dies.

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Poems Ancient and Modern readers, attentive as always, will remember Ben Jonson (1572–1637), whose June 11 birthday we marked by featuring his “To Celia” as Today’s Poem. Jonson, as you will no doubt recall, was a contemporary of Shakespeare and a revered elder for the Cavalier courtier-poets who surrounded the English king Charles I. Attentive as always, you’ll also remember your June 4 encounter here with Robert Herrick, clergyman among the poets styling themselves the “Tribe of Ben.” This tribe also included Sir John Suckling and Richard Lovelace, whose very names seem invented by the dilettantish culture they inhabited. 

Between Jonson and his Tribe, however, stands yet another figure. If Jonson himself represents a link between the Silver Age of Elizabethan poetry and the age of the Cavalier poets, then Thomas Carew (1595–1640) provides the link between Jonson and that younger generation of aristocratic revelers, living it up until the Puritan ax fell on their king. Writer of lyrics, songs, masques, and the occasional bit of erotica, Carew translated the influences of Jonson and his other great literary master, John Donne, as well as the musicality of Jonson’s older contemporary Thomas Campion, into the effervescent carpe diem verse which would come to define the Cavaliers.

Anthony van Dyck, Thomas Carew, by 1641 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, written as a song, would have made a suitable Cavalier anthem. Its quatrains, each composed of two couplets, generally scan as iambic tetrameter. Yet it’s possible to hear each stanza’s initial imperative — Ask me no more — as beginning with an inverted foot, a trochee followed by iambs, or else as an anapest, followed by trochees, with a trochaic half-foot at the end. Allen Ginsberg, who did hear the meter more or less that way, characterized this effect as a kind of “rise” at the start of each line: “Tanta-da-da.” 

In a poem refusing to bother its pretty head with questions, you might hear this metrical hiccup, with its emphasis on ask, as a twitch of impatience. So many questions! Where do the roses go to die? Where do sunbeams disappear to at twilight? What happens to the nightingale after spring? Where do the falling stars land? In which direction do we find that phoenix with her “spicy nest?” Darling, the speaker says, who cares? Stop asking me! 

The point is, here we are. In other words, here you are, sweetheart, with your lovely body. Yes, yes, it might be entertaining to have an existential crisis about the stars going out. We could go orienteering to find the phoenix. But don’t we have better things to do right now — which, after all, is the time that really matters? 

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