Thomas Campion (1567–1620), whose “When to Her Lute Corinna Sings” appeared in April as the Sun’s Poem of the Day, was a composer of madrigals, masques, and sacred songs, and the author of a treatise on music theory. 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 of the Day, “Now Winter Nights Enlarge,” is a madrigal, a late composition that appeared in Campion’s 1617 “Third Book of Ayres.” Even without the lilting musical setting, the lyric reads pleasingly as a poem, with its rhymed trimeter stanzas climaxing in a penultimate pentameter line before resolving again in trimeter. If winter nights “enlarge / the number of their hours,” this poem makes them also expansive, warm, and candlelit, full of the various “toys” that enliven and hasten the long storm-struck nights until the sun comes up again.

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.

___________________________________________ 

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 will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.