Rose-cheeked Laura Short notes from the web resource.

Rose-cheeked Laura

Rose-cheeked Laura is written by Campion to illustrate his theories of versification in Observations in the Art
of English Poesy, this song is a brilliant example of quantitative verse made musically effective in English.
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History of Elizabethan Writing Style.

After 1590, poets in general were beginning to think more deeply about the nature of the rhythms they were using. The influence of Greek and Latin theories of verse was beginning to become perni­cious. Greek and Latin poetry was measured verse, patterns of long and short syllables, since those languages had no stressed syllables. English verse in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was normally syllabic, mostly decasyllabic (10 syllables) in the narrative poems, and it is wrong to try to divide lines into "feet" in poems written before the very end of the 16th century. The notion of "feet" is derived directly from Greek metrical patterns of long and short vowels: iambic (unite, repeat), trochaic (unit, instant), anapestic (intervene, disarray), dactylic (Wash­ington, energy), or spondaic (headline, heartfelt). English lines almost naturally tend towards the iambic rhythm, and this can be found in medieval alliterative poems as well as in Chaucer, but there was no concept of "feet" until the late Elizabethan age received it from the classics.

The first step in this was for English poets to attempt to write English verse "quantatively" like Latin, ignoring the natural pattern of stress and attending only to the length of each syllable. Sidney was an innovator here, but others followed. The setting of quantative lines to music was perhaps made easier; Byrd set some such poems, but it was another musician, Thomas Campion (1567 - 1620), who made quantative verse the basis of his entire system and defended it theoreti­cally in a book, his Observations in the Art of English Poesy. Campion wrote his own lyrics, and this one (published in 1602) is designed to illustrate his theory of quantitative verse:


Rose-cheeked Laura, come,
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.

Lovely forms do flow
From concent divinely framed; (harmony)
Heav'n is music, and thy beauty's
Birth is heavenly.

These dull notes we sing
Discords need for helps to grace them;
Only beauty purely loving
Knows no discord,

But still moves delight,
Like clear springs renewed by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in them-
Selves eternal.

Campion was in fact quite wrong to disparage the natural patterns of stress that characterize English and the other modern European vernaculars, and quantitative verse had no future; instead, the native English stress patterns took the place of the long/short vowel patterns in the classical feet (meter being the Greek for measure) and the poetic lines received Greek names: tetrameter (4 feet), pentameter (5 feet, the most popular), hexameter (6 feet). Since most feet were iambic or trochaic (2 syllables), these names simply correspond to octosyllabic, decasyllabic, or twelve syllable lines.

It was his skill in music, rather than his odd ideas about meter, that guided Campion in his poetry-writing, and he is one of the finest writers of the decorative lyric that makes no claim to personal involve­ment.

Taken from
http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/books/Ren7.htm

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"Rose-cheeked Laura," by Thomas Campion. Harmon's note: This lyric is one of the most successful of the many Elizabethan experiments in basing versification on principles drawn from classical antiquity. It contains no rhyme, the rhythm is based on quantity (length of syllable) as well as quality (accent), lines are made up of different kinds of foot, and a word may be broken at the end of a line--a very rare occurrence in serious poetry. (Note that: "concent" is "harmonious music-making.")
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Short analysis

Thomas Campion’s Observations in the Art of English Poetry (1602), which features the poem “Rose-Cheeked Laura” as an example of English verse constructed according to the Classical pattern of quantity rather than stress. The first stanza of poem, Rose-cheekt Lawra come/Sing thou smoothly with thy beawties/Silent musick, either other/Sweetely are explained by Campion thus:

[it] consists of Dimeter, whose first foote may either be a Sponde or a Trochy [a spondee in this case]: The two verses following are both of them Trochaical, and consist of foure feete, the first of either of them being a Spondee or Trochy [spondee the second, trochaic the third in the example], the other three only Trochyes [since “thy” is considered short by Campion]. The fourth and last verse is made of two Trochyes.

“Rose-cheeked Laura” is so widely accepted as an example of successful quantitative verse in English that it is noted as such in the most recent edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature: “[...] this song is a brilliant example of quantitative verse made musically effective in English” (1198 n.1).

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Thomas Campion

Of all song-writers, Thomas Campion (1567-1620), inventive composer and masque-maker, wrote the best quantitative verse. His ‘Rose-cheeked Laura, come’, in praise of an ideal woman dancing, is the classic example. In later versions of this theme, the dancer, an emblem of Platonic harmony, sings. Campion’s Laura is accompanied only by her own silent music (and his verbal intelligence):