What if a Day,
Or a Month,
Or a Yeare?
by Thomas Campion

from Richard Alison's
An Howres Recreation in Musicke (1606)


What if a day, or a month, or a yeare
Crown thy delights with a thousand sweet contentings?
Cannot a chance of a night or an howre
Crosse thy desires with as many sad tormentings?
Fortune, honor, beauty, youth
Are but blossoms dying;
Wanton pleasure, doating love,
Are but shadowes flying.
All our joyes are but toyes,
Idle thoughts deceiving;
None have power of an howre
In their lives bereaving.

Earthes but a point to the world, and a man
Is but a point to the worlds compared centure:
Shall then a point of a point be so vaine
As to triumph in a seely points adventure?
All is hassard that we have,
There is nothing biding;
Dayes of pleasure are like streames
Through faire meadowes gliding.
Weale and woe, time doth goe,
Time is ever turning:
Secret fates guide our states,
Both in mirth and mourning.



MIDI: What if a Day by Thomas Campion - Sequenced by John Cowles



Text Source:
The Anchor Anthology of Sixteenth-Century Verse. Richard S. Sylvester, ed.
Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City: 1974. p. 549.

copied from http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/whatday.htm

Wolfgang