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"Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" is a popular old English song, the lyrics of which are Ben Jonson's 1616〔The poem was printed that year, among the poems that compose "The Forrest" in the printed folio of Jonson's work.〕 poem "Song. To Celia." ==Lyrics== Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup And I'll not ask for wine. The thirst that from the soul doth rise Doth ask a drink divine; But might I of Jove's〔Printed ''Iove's'' in the original. The initial J was coming into use in Johnston's time. The line is often mistranscribed "''But might I of love's nectar sup.''"〕 nectar〔Nectar and ambrosia were the food and drink of the Greek gods, conveying immortality.〕 sup, I would not change for thine. I sent thee late a rosy wreath, Not so much honouring thee As giving it a hope that there It could not withered be; But thou thereon didst only breathe, And sent'st it back to me, Since when it grows and smells, I swear, Not of itself but thee! John Addington Symonds demonstrated in ''The Academy'' 16 (1884) that almost every line has its counterpart in “Epistle xxxiii” of the erotic love-letter ''Epistles'' of Philostratus, The Athenian.〔Remarked by G.B. Johnston, ''Poems of Ben Jonson'', 1960, "Introduction" p.xl; Johnston notes (p.331) that Symonds was forestalled in the identification by John F. M. Dovaston, in ''The Monthly Magazine'' 1815, 123f.〕 Richard Cumberland had, however, identified the link to "an obscure collection of love-letters" by Philostratus as early as 1791.〔Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), The Observer: being a collection of moral, literary and familiar essays (Dublin: printed by Zachariah Jackson, for P. Byrne, R. Marchbank, J. Moore, and W. Jones, 1791). Volume 3, pp. 238-240.〕 George Burke Johnston noted that "the poem is not a translation, but a synthesis of scattered passages. Although only one conceit is not borrowed from Philostratus, the piece is a unified poem, and its glory is Jonson's. It has remained alive and popular for over three hundred years, and it is safe to say that no other work by Jonson is so well known."〔Johnston 1960, p. xl.〕 Another classical strain in the poem derives from Catullus.〔Bruce Boehrer, "Ben Jonson and the 'Traditio Basiorum': Catullan Imitation in 'The Forrest' 5 and 6", ''Papers on Language & Literature'' 32 (1996): full bibliography.〕 In a brief notice J. Gwyn Griffiths noted the similarity of the conceit of perfume given to the rosy wreath in a poem in the Greek Anthology〔Griffiths, "A Song from Philostratos", ''Greece & Rome'', 11.33 (May 1942), pp. 135-136.〕 and other classical parallels could be attested, natural enough in a writer of as wide reading as Jonson. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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