Today’s Poem: Rose-Cheeked Laura

Thomas Campion on what to do when rhyming is too easy

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Portrait of a girl, English, early 17th century (Wikimedia Commons)

In a 1602 treatise, Observations in the Art of English Poesie, the composer-physician Thomas Campion (1567–1620) inveighs against “the vulgar and artificial custom of riming.” What he really objects to, as it turns out, is not rhyme so much as sloppiness. English poets have inherited the patterns of classical meter — Latin wrested out of the Church and into secular use by Thomas More, Erasmus, and “other learned men of that age, who brought the Latine toong out of the hands of the illiterate monks and friars” — but also a native language whose patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables are largely uncongenial to those meters. According to Campion, would-be poets attempt to cover their lack of facility in meter by writing in rhyme and hoping nobody will notice the hiccups.

It’s easy enough to rhyme. In fact, that’s the easy way out, says Campion. Anybody can write in rhyme. Rhyme is not an accomplishment. In fact, “the facilitie and popularitie of rime creates as many Poets, as a hot summer flies.” What’s difficult, Campion says, is not to sound stupid. It’s easy to write in rhyme and still sound stupid. It’s easy, while you’re concentrating on what rhymes with what, to torque the natural rhythms of English, forcing the reader to pronounce a word — destiny, say, in the line Was it my destiny or dismal chance — as if the emphasis fell on the last syllable. You can rhyme all you want, says Campion, but if you make your reader say destinEE, then you have not done poetry very well at all. In fact, you should be stopped. 

In other words, to write good poetry, you have to master meter. You have to master the art of metrical lines whose syllables fall naturally, as in ordinary speech — lines whose high artifice never announces itself as artifice. How hard can that be, you ask. Campion’s answer is to devote the rest of his treatise to the principle of picking a dominant metrical foot and sticking to it, as an exercise. A composer of lute songs and “ayres,” he concerns himself particularly with writing lines that not only speak well, but sing well. The singer is not forced to find a place to snatch a desperate breath, or to pronounce words in strained or artificial ways. This level of mastery, as Campion suggests, is achieved only by sustained, deliberate practice of the sort he demonstrates.

Anonymous 17th-century lute player, possibly Thomas Campion (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, “Rose-Cheeked Laura,” is Campion’s sample exercise in the trochee (two syllables, the first stressed, the second unstressed) as dominant verse foot. These words were written to be sung, but in simply reading them aloud we can note the patterned precision, over three stanzas, of the metrical lines. Each first line, in tetrameter, consists of two trochees (Rose-cheeked Laura) plus a trochaic half-foot with its unstressed toes cut off. This line is followed by two lines of trochaic tetrameter (Sing thou smoothly with thy beauties), while each stanza concludes with a line of two trochaic feet (Sweetly gracing).

Note also that except for the emphatic repetition of beauties / beauty’s, these stanzas are unrhymed. The lines are so mesmerizingly rhythmic and full of alliterative internal music, syllables falling with natural ease into their patterns, that we hardly notice the absence of rhyme. We hardly notice, too, that the poem doesn’t say much, other than to entice this lovely Laura to come and not sing but be a song, in the living, fluid symmetry of her beauty. It’s a bauble of a poem, a little achievement of form — a perfect little achievement of form, about the perfect achievement of form. How hard could that be to do? Campion, the master, makes it look easy. 

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Rose-Cheeked Laura

by Thomas Campion 

Rose-cheeked Laura come
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauties
Silent music, either other
              Sweetly gracing.
Lovely formes do flow
From consent divinely framed,
Heav’n is music, and thy beauty’s
              Birth is heav’nly

These dull notes we sing
Discords need for helps to grace them,
Only beauty purely loving
              Knows no discord:
But still moves delight
Like clear springs renewed by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in them-
              selves eternal.

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