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] (note)) 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.
Page 8. Song.
The following air is found in Egerton MS. 2013. As given here it has been conjecturally corrected by Mr. Barclay Squire:
G O, and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake roote,
Tell me where all past times are,
Or who cleft the Devils foot,
5Teach me to hear mermaid's singing,