Song: to Celia (“Drink to me only with thine eyes”) Literary Elements

The poem is written in the first person and addressed to Celia, the speaker's unrequited love.

The poem is written in rhymed couplets. In these couplets, the first line is eight syllables and the second is six. The meter alternates stressed and unstressed syllables, with the longer lines beginning on a stressed syllable, and the shorter an unstressed syllable.

The third couplet invokes the conventional Christian metaphor of Christ and the immortality he offers as "living water."

Alliteration of /c/, line 3, "kiss but in the cup"
Alliteration of /d/, line 6, "doth ask a drink divine"
Alliteration of /s/, line 15-16, "smells, I swear,/Not of it self"

In the third couplet, the poet ironically brings up the one thirst (holy desire for eternal life) that his beloved cannot fulfill.
In the second half of the poem, the speaker remembers sending his beloved a wreath, because he believed she could keep it from dying. Ironically, although she rejects the wreath, her breath still keeps it alive.

carpe diem poetry, love poetry

The court

Wry, playful

The protagonist is the speaker. The antagonist is Celia, whose mind he is attempting to change.

The poem's major conflict is between the speaker's desire for Celia and her uninterest in him.

The climax comes in the final four lines of the poem, where Celia rejects the speaker's proffered wreath. Her rejection heightens the poem's conflict between the speaker's desire and her disinterest. It also emphasizes the conflict between the speaker's desire to compliment his beloved by emphasizing her divinity, and his hope that by emphasizing her mortality, he might persuade her to give in to his love.

The fifth through eighth lines leave ambiguous whether the beloved's affection is more appealing or life-giving than what God can offer. The final lines return to this question, more explicitly juxtaposing two conflicting readings of Celia as both life-giving and decaying.

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The first six lines of the poem are adapted from the writings of the Greek philosopher Philostratus. However, Jonson's adaptation enables him to allude to the idea of "living water" in the Christian Bible, when Christ says, "But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life" (John 4:14).
The fourth couplet also alludes to Greek mythology, referring to the idea from Greek myth that the nectar the gods drink grants immortality.

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The entire poem is a hyperbolic compliment to Celia, which characterizes her as almost divine.

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