It happens from time to time that John Dowland’s song “Flow, My Tears” (1600) comes across the playlist. Every time, it stops me in my tracks. It is utterly mystifying and truth-telling in ways that are painful and shocking. I then get obsessed and listen to every version of it. Every performance is different. Why? Maybe because it is so personal and overwhelmingly pathetic in the sense of being soaked with pathos.
Let me pause to say that the musical composition alone amazes me. Though I’m a lifetime musician raised in a musical family, no new melody has ever crossed my imagination. The capacity to hear and then render something new strikes me as some kind of gift from God. I say this whether we are talking about the Beatles’ “Yesterday” or Gustav Mahler’s “9th Symphony.” I cannot fathom the source of such new beauty.
For whatever reason, gorgeous melodies animated the heart of John Dowland. He also lived a tragic life. Enormously talented, he found himself entangled in the religious controversies of his home in England. He was a baptized Catholic when religious tolerance was at an end in his home country. The issue wasn’t theological so much as it was political, of course. He could not escape the crucifix he bore.
He applied for a job at the Elizabethan Court to be a lutenist but was rejected specifically on grounds of his religious loyalties. He was forced into exile just to play. He played a dangerous game of trying to ingratiate himself to the Anglican Court by volunteering as a spy, which was even more disreputable.
“I am forced to live in exile from my country and my friends,” he wrote.
He served briefly at the court of Christian IV of Denmark (1598–1606), but even here he was underpaid and treated as a second-class musician compared with the Italian and Flemish stars. He decided in these years to wear his heart on his sleeve in the form of compositions for lute and voice.
With all this sadness, his music still poured out, along with the great melody “Lacrimalae” (tears) for which he later wrote the astonishing words. As you read, imagine the repeated use of descending whole steps, literally the sounds of weeping.
Flow, my tears, fall from your springs, exiled for ever, let me mourn where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings, there let me live forlorn.
Down, vain lights, shine you no more, no nights are dark enough for those that in despair their lost fortunes deplore; light doth but shame disclose.
Never may my woes be relieved, since pity is fled, and tears and sighs and groans my weary days, my weary days of all joys have deprived.
From the highest spire of contentment my fortune is thrown, and fear and grief and pain for my deserts, for my deserts are my hopes since hope is gone.
Hark, you shadows that in darkness dwell, learn to contemn light; happy, happy they that in hell feel not the world’s despite.
As I say, it was the greatest hit of the 17th century and maybe the greatest hit of all time!
Can you imagine the depths of despair he must have felt at the time of writing? It takes your breath away. And his insight concerning social approbation: it can be worse than we imagine hell to be. This is a fascinating insight, the extent to which people will go to avoid being judged negatively by their peers. The pain can be unimaginable.
It’s intriguing that such thoughts were around in 1600 just as intensely as they are here today. In my own historical imagination, I tend to regard these as good times. The plagues were over, and prosperity was on the rise. The middle class was forming, and new opportunities were available for food, dress, and travel. People actually had real money to spend, unlike 400 years earlier.
The optimism in the air is obvious in the music at the time. If you compare anything composed in England or Italy from 1590 with something like the Vespers service of Claudio Monteverdi of 1605, you almost cannot believe that only 15 years passed between one and the other. The “Vespers” of Monteverdi is packed with drums, trumpets, wild invention, choral theatrics, jazzy rhythms, and a real communicative expression that is designed not just for God but also for man.
All of this unfolded in a short period of time. But John Downland wasn’t having it. He was miserable personally.
Why wasn’t everyone happy? Because happiness is not about the times. It is about the individual human experience and the individual human heart. Downland’s was breaking. And every time we hear this song, though it was written more than 400 years ago, our hearts break along with him.
It’s the eternal song of despair.
To be sure, musicians are perhaps more emotionally tender than the normal lot of people.
Indeed, I shared the song with scholar Thomas Harrington, who said the most hilarious thing.
“This song is one of the greatest extended acts of histrionic self-pity ever written,” Harrington said. “‘Contemn the light!’ And in that sense it is very much a song for our age, one that denies, indeed mocks the unfathomable miracle of being alive.”
Wow, great corrective. It reminds me of the scene in “The Godfather” when Vito Corleone slaps a morose Johnny Fontaine while saying: “You can act like a man!”
Indeed. Maybe Dowland needed to say something like that to him. Sometimes we all need someone to say that to us when we wallow in misery and forget to thank God for the gift of being alive.
The culture today often feels like it is sinking into depression. The signs are all around us. “Flow, my tears, fall from your springs, exiled for ever”—it’s a song many are singing today. We need a better way than psych drugs and substance abuse to deal with it. We need faith and hope and a direction to move forward, something other than self-pity.
A final word on perhaps a reason this song has been popular for more than 400 years. Maybe we like to hear the inner thoughts of someone even more miserable than we are at our worst moments. Perhaps the song says to us: “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Indeed, there is always and everywhere a source of hope. Sometimes we have to work harder to find its source.
