Today’s Poem: Weep You No More, Sad Fountains

A song about tears, from the Tudor era’s foremost composer of songs about tears

Theodor Rombouts, The Lute Player, c. 1625 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Weep You No More, Sad Fountains

by John Dowland

Weep you no more, sad fountains;
What need you flow so fast?
Look how the snowy mountains
Heaven’s sun doth gently waste.
But my sun’s heavenly eyes
View not your weeping,
That now lie sleeping
Softly, now softly lies
Sleeping.

Sleep is a reconciling,
A rest that peace begets.
Doth not the sun rise smiling
When fair at even he sets?
Rest you then, rest, sad eyes,
Melt not in weeping
While she lies sleeping
Softly, now softly lies
Sleeping.

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Like his direct contemporary, Thomas Campion (whose “Rose-Cheeked Laura” we featured as Today’s Poem on April 16) John Dowland (c. 1563–1626) was a lutenist and composer of songs for that instrument. Details of his early life have been lost to time, with sources disagreeing over the year and place of his birth, and no hard details regarding his whereabouts before 1580.

In that year he took service under two ambassadors to the French court at Paris and, while there, converted to Roman Catholicism, a move that did not smooth the way for career advancement in England. In 1594, he applied but for but was not appointed to a post as court lutenist to Elizabeth I, a failure he attributed to his religious persuasion. Interestingly, another contemporary, the composer William Byrd (c. 1540–1623), also a Catholic, was suspended from his appointment as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1583 because of his recusancy but returned to hold that position again until the early 1590s. 

In 1598, Dowland joined the royal court of Denmark, where he was paid handsomely to play the lute in what amounted to his spare time, between extended trips back to England. By 1606, the Danish king, although a musical enthusiast and particular admirer of Dowland, had had enough of his long absences and dismissed him. In 1612, in England again, Dowland achieved, finally, a position as lutenist to James I. He held this post until his death, receiving one last payment on January 20, 1626, a month to the day before his burial at St. Ann’s, Blackfriars, in London.

Beyond these suggestive biographical details, we know nothing about the man himself. But in his lyrics, if not in his person, Dowland tended toward melancholia. Where Thomas Campion wrote lute songs about beautiful girls (sometimes playing lutes) that would influence the next generation’s Cavalier poets, Dowland’s oeuvre is notable for its frequent references to tears and weeping. His most famous work, in fact, was an instrumental suite entitled “Lacrimae” or “Seaven Teares,” a series of pavanes, or slow processional dance tunes, each developing a theme from his lute song, 1596 “Flow My Tears.” He often signed himself Jo: dolandi di Lacrimae, or John Dowland of the Tears. 

17th-century manuscript of lute music (DCMS)

Today’s Poem, not surprisingly, is a song about tears: unhappy eyes as fountains of grief for lost hopes. Its nine-line stanzas, rhymed ababcddcd, are full of metrical shifts, in a pattern as detailed as the the musical setting for which the lines were composed. Each of the a-rhymed lines, in both stanzas, scans as a dactyl and two trochees, while the b-lines are regularly iambic. As each stanza moves toward its closing refrain, the first c-rhymed lines repeat the pattern of the a-lines, while the d-lines echo it in diameter, with a dactyl and one trochee. The repeated penultimate line, “Softly now, softly lies,” is two dactyls, before the stanza dwindles to a single trochaic word, “Sleeping.” This repetitive but varied patterning generates a liquid musicality, even when the poem is read, not sung.

And because it’s a song, as much about its own sounds as anything else, maybe we don’t mind so much that it’s hard to tell who needs consoling, or for what. We don’t know, for instance, who or what “lies / Sleeping” in the first stanza. The verb changes mysteriously from the plural “lie sleeping” in line 7 (presumably in agreement with “my sun’s heavenly eyes”) to the singular “softly lies” of line 8, which seems, at least at first glance, to have no subject.

It’s also difficult to say to what the image of “my sun’s eyes” refers, unless it’s to the woman who appears in the second stanza. She “softly lies / Sleeping,” but where? In someone else’s bed? The speaker’s bed, for instance, even as he assures the weeping you that sleep “is a reconciling?” Or is her soft sleep the sleep of the grave? To what, exactly, must this you — who might be another person, or might be the speaker, consoling himself for the loss of love — be reconciled? We don’t know for sure. But maybe we don’t care, either, caught as we are in the melancholy spell of the song.

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