Weep you no more, sad fountains
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.
This week’s poem is from The Third and Last Book of Songs or Aires by John Dowland (1563-1626), Elizabeth I’s court musician. It’s been suggested that the song alluded to the queen, who, after increasingly poor health, died in 1603, the year of the book’s publication. Obituaries are written in advance, so why not an elegy? And perhaps some would argue it’s not an elegy at all, but a lullaby in praise of sleep. Whatever its origins, Dowland’s song seems charged with personal emotion.
Three challenges are directed to the “sad fountains” at the start of the first verse: the fountains are told to “weep no more”, questioned as to why they need to “flow so fast”, and, in consequence, asked to turn their attention to the melting snow on the mountains. The fountains are not, I think, to be taken literally. The singer-lover is addressing his own grief in the form of his own weeping eyes. The questions surrounding this “conceit” help build its artistry.
The imagery of the sun “[that] doth gently waste” the snowy mountains, and the rapid streams of snow-melt, deflects the speaker from self-absorption. “Heaven’s sun” is a destroyer but a “gentle” and necessary one: the picture presented is, after all, that of the spring thaw. The rhetorical device is meant to question the need for any competition from human tears, but these lines present the mountains, the sun and the pouring streams, as if the writer could see them. The conceits serve the poem by heightening metaphorical possibilities and emotional connections.
Cleverly, after the naturalism of lines three and four, the sun is reborn to human identity and intimacy with the speaker: “my sun’s heavenly eyes”. The play on words (“Heaven’s sun”, “my sun’s heavenly eyes”) performs a beautiful figure, which may also be part of a larger revision to a tired convention. The eyes of the mistress often have the power to destroy poetic suitors. Here, pathos intensifies because the woman’s eyes are closed in sleep, oblivious to the overflowing eyes of her lover. There’s no cruelty from her, no request from him for her pity: she remains asleep, so “softly” perhaps, that she no longer stirs at all.
The second verse continues the lover’s argument with himself, but in a different key. The diction at first is somewhat abstract, wonderfully nuanced but perhaps more a matter of received wisdom than it was earlier: “Sleep is a reconciling, / A rest that peace begets.” There seems little doubt that the poet, as before, is talking about death, not sleep. A muted Christian analogy with resurrection underlies the rhetorical flourish, “Doth not the sun rise smiling / When fair at even he sets?” Mourning, it seems, is un-Christian. The repentant dead are at peace in a more heavenly and sun-like place. The mourner’s tears are wasted snow-melt, and, implicitly, selfish.
In each verse, the last two lines of the refrain bring about a shift of rhythm, a pulse fading from four beats to one. This rhythm, on the page, is more interesting than the language itself: “softly, now softly lies / sleeping”). It suggests that the composer or singer is being offered an opportunity for personal embellishment.
Otherwise, from the metaphorical ingenuity of the first verse to the subtle reprise, in the last, of the opening themes and images, this song surely has the power to stand alone as a poem. It has a complex life on the page, and, by words alone, creates that indispensable “voice” that is heard only inside a reader’s head.
