A song meant for the Elizabethans a poem intended to be sung,
generally to the accompaniment of the lute. Donne had clearly no
thought of his songs being an exception to this rule:
But when I have done so,
Some man his art and voice to show
Doth set and sing my paine.
Yet it is difficult to think of some, perhaps the majority, of Donne's
_Songs and Sonets_ as being written to be sung. Their sonorous and
rhetorical rhythm, the elaborate stanzas which, like the prolonged
periods of the _Elegies_, seem to give us a foretaste of the Miltonic
verse-paragraph, suggest speech,--impassioned, rhythmical speech
rather than the melody of song. We are not haunted by a sense of the
tune to which the song should go, as we are in reading the lyrics of
the Elizabethan Anthologies or of Robert Burns. Yet some of Donne's
songs _were_ set to music. A note in one group of MSS. describes three
of them as 'Songs which were made to certain ayres which were made
before'. One of these is _The Baite_, which must have been set to
the same air as Marlowe's song. I reproduce here a lute-accompaniment
found in William Corkine's _Second Book of Ayres_ (1612). The airs of
the other two (see p. 18) I have not been able to find, nor are they
known to Mr. Barclay Squire, who has kindly helped and guided me in
this matter of the music. With his aid I have reproduced here the
music of two other songs, and, at another place, that of one of
Donne's great _Hymns_.