Follow Your Saint

By Thomas Campion 1567–1620 Thomas Campion

Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;

Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet.

There, wrapp'd in cloud of sorrow, pity move,

And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her love:

But if she scorns my never-ceasing pain,

Then burst with sighing in her sight and ne'er return again.

All that I sung still to her praise did tend,

Still she was first; still she my songs did end;

Yet she my love and music both doth fly,

The music that her echo is and beauty's sympathy.

Then let my notes pursue her scornful flight:

It shall suffice that they were breath'd and died for her delight.

Biography

Thomas Campion's importance for nondramatic literature of the English Renaissance lies in the exceptional intimacy of the musical-poetic connection in his work. While other poets and musicians talked about the union of the two arts, only Campion produced complete songs wholly of his own composition, and only he wrote lyric poetry of enduring literary value whose very construction is deeply etched with the poet's care for its . . .

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