Poem of the Day: ‘Now Winter Nights Enlarge’ 

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.