Today’s Poem: Now Winter Nights Enlarge

Thomas Campion’s expansive season

Marie Spartali Stillman, The Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo, 1889 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Now Winter Nights Enlarge

by Thomas Campion

Now winter nights enlarge 
The number of their hours; 
And clouds their storms discharge 
Upon the airy towers. 
Let now the chimneys blaze 
And cups o’erflow with wine, 
Let well-turned words amaze 
With harmony divine. 
Now yellow waxen lights 
Shall wait on honey love 
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights 
Sleep’s leaden spells remove. 
 
This time doth well dispense 
With lovers’ long discourse; 
Much speech hath some defense, 
Though beauty no remorse. 
All do not all things well; 
Some measures comely tread, 
Some knotted riddles tell, 
Some poems smoothly read. 
The summer hath his joys, 
And winter his delights; 
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys, 
They shorten tedious nights.
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Thomas Campion (1567–1620), whose “Rose-Cheeked Laura” appeared here last April, was — as astute readers will recall — a composer of madrigals, masques, and sacred songs, and the author of treatises on music theory and poetics. Having left Peterhouse College, Cambridge, and Gray’s Inn, London, without obtaining either a university degree or a lawyer’s credentials, he eventually made his way to Caen, on the Normandy coast, where in 1605 he received a medical degree. For the next fifteen years, until his death, he practiced as a physician in London, while continuing to pour out poems and songs.

Today’s Poem, “Now Winter Nights Enlarge,” is a madrigal, a late composition included in Campion’s Third and Fourth Book of Ayres, published as a single volume in 1617. Even without the lilting musical setting, the lyric reads pleasingly as a poem. It’s also an excellent choice for memorization. Contra the mandate of the next-generation’s Cavalier poets to seize the day, this poem’s injunction is to hurry the time along in jolly fashion from sunset to sunrise.

Anonymous 17th-century lutenist, thought to be Thomas Campion (Wikimedia Commons)

Its 12-line trimeter stanzas, rhymed ababcdcdefef, crescendo in a penultimate pentameter line before resolving again into trimeter. If winter nights “enlarge / the number of their hours,” this poem makes those dark hours expansive, rather than long. Though the “clouds their storms discharge / Upon the airy towers,” indoors all is warm and candlelit. The drink flows. Madrigals “amaze” their hearers. The time is full of the various “toys” — romantic dalliance, for example — that enliven and hasten the long storm-struck nights, until the sun comes up again.

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