To Celia
Ben Jonshon
Ben Jonson was a contemporary of Shakespeare.
He was a prominent dramatist of his time.
He was a classicist, a moralist, and a reformer.
Jonson was one of the most dominant literary figures of the Elizabethan age.
With his assertive position as a poet Laureate, he fought against the romantic tendency of his age.
Jonson opined that ‘men in his deepest nature is a moral being’.
- We find a strong Lyrical gift in his poems.
“Drink to me only with thine eyes” is a beautiful line from his ‘Celia’.
To Celia
To Celia is a two-stanza poem.
It is an eight-lined stanza.
- the song describes the deep love of the poem for his beloved.
- “Drink to me only with thine eyes” strongly reverberates his
love.
- Each word seems to bubble with love.
Though he know very well that she would never accept him.
It seems as if the chalice and the beloved is drinking the contents.
The poet further says, giving her options that
She could “leave a kiss but in the cup”
And the poet drinking from the same cup would take it as wine.
The content in the cup could be anything.
But the ‘kiss’ on the cup made everything in it as ‘wine’.
And this drink in the cup would be for the poet ‘a drink divine’
- So much so that
- ‘But the might of I of Jove’s nectar sup’
a) The emotional depth of the love is so vast that he says a drink from the cup was so precious that
b) he “would not change for thine”
a) The poet no cost would change his love
b) even through that she would never accept him.
In the next stanza, the poet says that
He had sent a wreath to her
The poet accepts that he had no ‘hope’ whatsoever that she would accept it.
He knew that the ‘rosy wreath’ would be returned.
But then when the wreath came back to him, the wreath had lost its smell.
It had a sublime effect.
As his beloved had simply breathed on it. The wreath had changed.
Now “when it grows and smells I swear not of itself, but she”
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