Summary
In “Song: to Celia,” the speaker addresses Celia directly, entreating her to return even a small portion of his affections. In the famous first line, he says that if her gaze merely “drinks to him,” or indicates with her gaze that she raises a glass in his favor, his eyes will pledge loyalty to her. Similarly, if she merely leaves the mark of her lips on the cup, that kiss will be the only wine he needs.
In the third couplet, the speaker turns more philosophical. He writes that there is a thirst in his soul that demands a heavenly drink—Jonson is alluding to Christian theology, which describes Jesus as “the living water” for which our souls thirst. Yet the following couplet undermines the poet’s privileging of God by declaring that he wouldn’t exchange a kiss from his beloved Celia for the nectar of the gods.
The second half of the poem, beginning in line nine, is more narrative. The speaker says that he recently sent Celia a wreath of roses, not so much to honor her, but because he hoped that in her presence, the roses would not die. However, she merely breathed on the roses and sent them back to him. Since then, the roses have kept growing, despite having been cut, and they now smell not like roses, but like Celia.
Analysis
At its most basic, “Song: to Celia” is a lengthy compliment to the titular woman. The speaker attempts to woo his beloved by devising increasingly hyperbolic ways of praising her, ultimately describing her as almost divine. It’s also a “carpe diem” love poem, or a love poem that aims to persuade someone to return the speaker’s affections by emphasizing their mortality. The genre was a favorite of Shakespeare, who wrote many sonnets on this exact topic, addressed to a young man. For example, in Sonnet 10, he writes,
Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,
But that thou none lov'st is most evident:
For thou art so possessed with murderous hate,
That 'gainst thy self thou stick'st not to conspire
…
Make thee another self for love of me,That beauty still may live in thine or thee.
He’s arguing that by failing to fall in love, the addressee is only hurting himself by guaranteeing his own death. Only by consenting to fall in love and having children can the youth make a copy of himself, and hence live forever.
The theme is a little less obvious in “Song: to Celia,” but when we look closer, death is all over the poem. In fact, in "The Forest," the poetry collection where “Song: to Celia” appears, he also publishes another, less famous poem for Celia which more explicitly evinces the “carpe diem” argument. The poem begins,
Come my Celia, let us prove,
While we may, the sports of love.
Time will not be ours for ever:
He at length our good will sever.
Spend not then his gifts in vain
For someone reading through the book of poems as Jonson originally intended, that foreboding context would have immediately informed their reading of “Song: to Celia.” We first see the idea of death in the fifth line, where Jonson writes, “The thirst, that from the soul doth rise, / Doth ask a drink divine.” In other words, the soul’s thirst asks for a divine drink. He’s translating from the Greek philosopher Philostratus here, but adapting that translation to also allude to a well-known Christian metaphor for the desire for eternal life. In the Gospels, Christ refers to himself as the “living water,” and declares that “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.”
Jonson specifies that this is the soul’s thirst because Christians differentiated between the body and the soul in matters of immortality. According to Christian theology, the body is mortal, and truly dies when we die. The soul, however, is immortal, and after death goes to God for judgment. When Jonson writes in “Song: to Celia” that his soul thirsts for a “drink divine,” he means that his soul desires the “living water” given by Christ, which guarantees eternal life.
However, things get more complicated, because this isn’t a religious poem, but a love poem. The next couplet is the most famous in the poem, and indeed one of the most famous in English literature, because it’s so fundamentally ambiguous. Indeed, this couplet is also the first truly original content in the poem. The first six lines were adapted from the writings of the Greek philosopher Philostratus—although, as we’ve seen, Jonson’s adaptation introduces a Christian context that was absent from the original Greek writing. The next couplet, however, is the poet’s own invention. Jonson writes, “But might I of Jove's Nectar sup, / I would not change for thine.”
It’s possible to read this line in two opposite ways. On the one hand, Jonson could be using “But” to mean “even if”—even if I had the chance to drink the nectar of the gods, I wouldn’t be willing to give up your love in exchange. Alternately, Jonson might mean “only if”—only if I had the chance to taste of the gods, would I be willing to give up your affection in exchange. In some ways, the distinction isn’t very important. Either way, Jonson sees his beloved’s affections and the nectar of the gods as of similar value, which is a pretty big compliment to the beloved.
However, in light of the previous stanza, it’s a little more complicated. After all, from an orthodox Christian perspective, it would be pretty dangerous to suggest that you’d choose your beloved’s affections over the eternal life given by God. In the exchange couplet itself, of course, Jonson doesn’t refer to Christianity. He instead speaks of “Jove’s Nectar,” or the nectar of the Greek gods, said to confer eternal life. Nevertheless, the similarity is pretty pronounced.
Indeed, when we think about the poem as a whole, it probably makes more sense to read “but” as “only if” rather than “even if.” To us, that might seem counterintuitive—after all, this is a love poem, and Jonson has just specified something he values more than his beloved’s affections. Not very romantic. Yet in the context of the “carpe diem” genre, emphasizing that the lover cannot grant eternal life actually makes the argument stronger. After all, her mortality is precisely why she should give in and accept the speaker’s affections.
The unusual second half of the poem continues to play with ideas about mortality, divinity, and love. The speaker writes that he recently gave his beloved a wreath of roses, in the “hope” that with her it would not wither. Again, the speaker is finding a unique way to compliment his beloved, by stating that she seems like someone who might be able to grant immortality to flowers.
Yet the last few lines have just reminded the reader that only God can truly quench the soul’s thirst for immortality. When we look at the rose stanzas again, we can see that they have a darker edge. The addition of the word “late” to line nine doesn’t really add anything to the meaning of the poem. However, in early modern English “late” was also a synonym for “dead.” The superfluity of the word means we’re more likely to think of this other meaning, especially because it makes sense that, if the speaker was a bit late in sending off his wreath, the roses themselves might have been nearer to death. Furthermore, the speaker doesn’t trust that the roses will be safe with his beloved, but merely sends them off to give them “a hope” of survival. Death is certain with him, but life only a possibility with his beloved.
Regardless, the beloved doesn’t actually care for the roses, but instead sends them back to the speaker. The logic of the preceding couplet thus means that the roses are now guaranteed to wither and die. We can again read the final two lines in two very divergent ways. On the one hand, they are another over-the-top compliment to Celia. The speaker thought the roses needed to be with her, but it turns out that all it took was her breathing on them, and now they are growing again. Even more, they no longer smell like themselves, but rather like her, meaning she has transformed the flowers in more ways than one.
Yet we can just as easily read the conclusion as a veiled reminder of Celia’s mortality. The fact that the roses are growing means they are changing, in the way all living things do. And Jonson doesn’t even state explicitly that they’re growing more beautiful—indeed, the logic of the poem means that, having returned to him, we might expect them to grow more withered. If they are withering, then the final lines of the poem become an insult. The rotting roses no longer smell like themselves, but rather like Celia. By failing to accept his affections, she’s guaranteeing not only the death of the roses, but also her own decay.
Although bleak, that message was par for the course for Renaissance love poetry. Indeed, the speaker’s criticism doesn’t even put him in the wrong. After all, recognizing that his beloved can’t grant eternal life means he’s more likely to pay attention to his soul’s thirst for the divine drink—the Christian salvation, which, to Jonson, would have been the only eternal life worth looking for.
