Poem of the Day: ‘Ask Me No More Where Jove Bestows’

Readers of The New York Sun, attentive as always, will remember Ben Jonson (1572–1637), whose “To Celia” appeared as Poem of the Day this past June 13, as both a contemporary of Shakespeare and, being longer-lived, as a revered elder for the Cavalier courtier-poets who surrounded the English king Charles I. And attentive as always, Sun readers will also remember their encounters with a number of those poets, who styled themselves the “Tribe of Ben”: Suckling and Lovelace, for example, whose very names seem invented by the dilettantish culture they inhabited, but also the clergyman Robert Herrick, whose poems seek “To Find God” and “To Keep a True Lent,” but also, at least sometimes, to seize the day. Between Jonson and his Tribe, however, stands 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, into the more effervescent verse which would come to be associated with the Cavaliers.Today’s Poem of the Day, written as a song, would have made a suitable Cavalier anthem. In quatrains composed of tetrameter couplets, it refuses to bother its pretty head with questions. Where do the roses go to die? Where do sunbeams go at twilight? What happens to the nightingale after spring? Where do the falling stars land? Darling, the poem says, who cares? The point is, here we are. In other words, here is this woman with her lovely body. While it might be entertaining to have an existential crisis about the stars going out, there are better things to do at the present moment, which is the only time that really matters. Ask Me No More Where Jove Bestowsby Thomas CarewAsk me no more where Jove bestows,When June is past, the fading rose;For in your beauty’s orient deepThese flowers, as in their causes, sleep.Ask me no more whither do strayThe golden atoms of the day;For in pure love heaven did prepareThose powders to enrich your hair.Ask me no more whither doth hasteThe nightingale, when May is past;For in your sweet dividing throatShe 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 thereFixed become, as in their sphere.Ask me no more if east or westThe phoenix builds her spicy nest;For unto you at last she flies,And in your fragrant bosom dies.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Ask Me No More Where Jove Bestows’

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