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Tuesday 6 January 2015

Thomas Campion: Now winter nights enlarge

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The moon right now!! Stunning!! #fullmoon: image via Maaz Khan @DirectorMaazK, 5 January 2015


Now winter nights enlarge
    The number of their houres;
And clouds their stormes discharge
    Upon the ayrie towres.
Let now the chimneys blaze
    And cups o'erflow with wine,
Let well-tun'd words amaze
    With harmonie diuine.
Now yellow waxen lights
    Shall waite on hunny Loue
While youthfull Reuels, Masks, and Courtly sights,
    Sleepes leaden spels remoue.

This time doth well dispence
    With louers long discourse;
Much speech hath some defence,
    Though beauty no remorse.
All doe not all things well;
    Some measures comely tread;
Some knotted Ridles tell;
    Some Poems smoothly read.
The Summer hath his ioyes,
    And Winter his delights;
Though Loue and all his pleasures are but toyes,
    They shorten tedious nights.


 
Thomas Campion (1567-1620): Now winter nights enlarge, from The Third and Fourth Booke of Ayeres, 1617



A fallow deer grazes in Richmond Park, London, after a night of heavy frost as the temperature dipped below freezing in the capital on New Years Eve: photo by Ben Stevens /i-Images via the Guardian, 2 January 2015


Harbin, China. A visitor makes her way through a maze made of ice bricks ahead of the 31st Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival: photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters via the Guardian, 4 January 2015


Moorhens wake up as the rising sun begins to burn off overnight frost at the National Trust’s Dunham Massey park in Altrincham, UK
: photo by Christopher Furlong via the Guardian, 2 January 2015


The festival begins on Monday and will last about three months: photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters via the Guardian, 5 January 2015


Berlin, Germany. Rain drops veil the view of Brandenburg Gate, while passers-by walk across Pariser Platz: photo by Paul Zinken/EPA via the Guardian, 5 January 2015


Visitors walk in an ice maze: photo by Fred Dufour/AFP via the Guardian, 5 January 2015


 A cormorant perches on a branch
at the National Trust’s Dunham Massey park in Altrincham, UK: photo by Christopher Furlong via the Guardian, 2 January 2015


A woman looks for space to hang her red ribbon bearing her wish on an ice sculpture: photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters via the Guardian, 5 January 2015


A black-headed gull (Larus ridibundus) slips on a frozen lake surface at Golden Acre Park, Leeds, UK: photo by Paul Miguel/Rex Features via the Guardian, 2 January 2015


This year’s theme is ‘Happy Ice Snow, Exciting City’: photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters via the Guardian, 5 January 2015


A snowy owl at Gull Point at Presque Isle state park in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was one of two tundra owls spotted by birdwatchers on Monday at Gull Point. The dark markings on this owl suggest it is either an adult female or juvenile: photo by Christopher Millette/AP via the Guardian, 2 January 2015


Manama, Bahrain. Bahraini anti-government protesters holding a national flag take cover from tear gas during clashes: photo by Hasan Jamali/AP via The Guardian, 4 January 2015


Bolney, UK. Morris Men perform during an ‘Apple Howling’ ceremony at Old Mill Farm to encourage a bountiful cider crop for the following year: photo by Peter Macdiarmid via the Guardian, 5 January 2015

Full moon tonight...woooo! #cancun #2015 #fullmoon by scorpion2569: image via InstaCancun@instaCancun, 5 January 2015
 

Great photo of last night's #FullMoon via @sc9 #Melbourne: image via Scienceworks @science _works, 5 January 2015
 

A beautiful #fullmoon: image via Marilyn Denis @ MarilynDenisCTV, 5 January 2015

  
From the fam in Tennessee #fullmoon #earthsky: image via Greer Bishop @ImNotGreer, 5 January 2015

Embedded image permalink

First #FullMoon of 2015 is TONIGHT! Known as the Full Wolf #Moon, Old Moon & the Moon after Yule! (Photo via NASA): image via The Weather Channel@weatherchannel, 4 January 2015


The #moon is amazing. #fullmoon tonight! Let's get in trouble!! Lol: image via TIME TO RIDE @bet680, 5 January 2015


#fullmoon
The sky is the limit.... "Our Moon" : image via Danny Jensen @danjsm, 5 January 2015


I'm guessing this means there's an #alpha somewhere near #LakeTahoe? #TeenWolf #FullMoon: image via Matthew De Negro @MatthewDelNegro, 5 January 2015


New York, USA. A House Sparrow bathes in a shallow pool in Manhattan: photo by Pacific Coast News/BarcroftMedia via The Guardian, 4 January 2015

6 comments:

TC said...

Lutenist Maurice Cope plays Campion's setting of Now Winter Nights Enlarge

tpw said...

Beautiful post. Winter does have its stark & lovely delights.

manik sharma said...

Tom,
An ice maze reminds me of Jack Nicholson near the end of The Shining, and just how pissed that made him.
Don't want to have that kind of 'Exciting City'.

TC said...

Thank you esteemed friends for visiting our international snow and ice spectacular.

(tpw of the excellent family of Campion, poet / musician.)

Happy Exciting City Labyrinth Torture!

And now...

Hee-e-e-re's Johnny!

Mose23 said...

That maze did bring Mr Torrance to mind.

Now yellow waxen lights
Shall waite on hunny Love

Keep turning these lines over. Beautiful.

TC said...

Intimate craft sense of the weights and lengths of vowels and the way these invite, enable and and are in turn inflected by the singing voice -- a phenomenon of the age of English musicianship, nowhere better heard than in Campion, whose singular construction of an English metric along classical quantitative lines still remains to be fully understood and explored.

An investigation not likely to occur any time soon.

Ezra Pound held up Campion (along with Herrick) as models of the possibility of English lyric, and this instruction became the basis of the advance of the next poet after Pound (and possibly the last before the random shuffle deluge) to move our prosody forward -- or anyway in an interesting direction, and away from the glib, indolent, and slack.

Creeley, writing in The Black Mountain Review, 1954: "Thomas Campion... He gave his attention to the words and the rhythms which they carried in them, to be related then as they occurred."

Pound had been insisting all along that a good ear, a little patience and a bit of work might do wonders in this area. Those things, and an enquiring mind.

"The question of the relative duration of syllables has never been neglected by [poets] with sensitive ears": E.P., writing in 1934.