"Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow"
About this Quote
Campion distills the drama of unrequited love into a stark emblem: the beloved as the sun, radiant and self-sufficient; the lover as a shadow, dependent, insubstantial, and compelled to follow. The command to follow sounds like agency, yet a shadow has none. Desire issues an order the self cannot refuse, dramatizing love as compulsion rather than choice. The adjective fair exalts the beloved’s beauty, while unhappy acknowledges the lover’s derivative existence, living only by borrowed light.
As a poet-composer of the early seventeenth century, Campion writes within the English lute-song and Petrarchan traditions, where unattainable affection is both torment and discipline. Light and shadow were favorite Renaissance emblems; Campion turns them into a living conceit that explains both the lover’s constancy and his futility. The shadow never touches what makes it; it only proves the sun’s presence by its own privation. So the lover’s devotion proclaims the beloved’s worth even as it confirms his own lack.
Time quietly enters the image. As the sun moves, the shadow shortens, lengthens, and finally dissolves at night. Longing changes with the hours, tightening to an ache at noon, stretching into melancholy at dusk, and yielding to obliteration when light is gone. The pursuit ends not with possession but with darkness, a hint of mortality. The self-address of the line suggests an inner division: the reasoning voice admonishes the passion-struck double, urging persistence or resignation, and the poem often toggles between such stances.
Campion’s craft furthers the idea. The cadence of follow and fair advances and then falls away, a miniaturized chase. Simple monosyllables carry complex feeling; the pause after sun enacts the distance the shadow cannot close. Behind the courtly posture lies a Neoplatonic longing for an ideal source that cannot be grasped, only approached. Love, for Campion, is an elegant geometry of light: the brighter the sun, the sharper the shadow; the truer the devotion, the more it reveals the space between desire and fulfillment.
As a poet-composer of the early seventeenth century, Campion writes within the English lute-song and Petrarchan traditions, where unattainable affection is both torment and discipline. Light and shadow were favorite Renaissance emblems; Campion turns them into a living conceit that explains both the lover’s constancy and his futility. The shadow never touches what makes it; it only proves the sun’s presence by its own privation. So the lover’s devotion proclaims the beloved’s worth even as it confirms his own lack.
Time quietly enters the image. As the sun moves, the shadow shortens, lengthens, and finally dissolves at night. Longing changes with the hours, tightening to an ache at noon, stretching into melancholy at dusk, and yielding to obliteration when light is gone. The pursuit ends not with possession but with darkness, a hint of mortality. The self-address of the line suggests an inner division: the reasoning voice admonishes the passion-struck double, urging persistence or resignation, and the poem often toggles between such stances.
Campion’s craft furthers the idea. The cadence of follow and fair advances and then falls away, a miniaturized chase. Simple monosyllables carry complex feeling; the pause after sun enacts the distance the shadow cannot close. Behind the courtly posture lies a Neoplatonic longing for an ideal source that cannot be grasped, only approached. Love, for Campion, is an elegant geometry of light: the brighter the sun, the sharper the shadow; the truer the devotion, the more it reveals the space between desire and fulfillment.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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