This seems unlikely since Jonson's poem was set to an entirely different melody in 1756 by Elizabeth Turner.
Willa McClung Evans suggested that Jonson's lyrics were fitted to a tune already in existence and that the fortunate marriage of words to music accounted in part for its excellence. The meaning of the line is that even if the poet could drink to his heart's content of the nectar of the king of the gods, he would prefer the nectar made by his earthly beloved. The word "sup" has also often been changed to "sip" but "sup" rhymes with "cup", and is clearly the reading in the first edition. "Iove" here indicates Jove, but this was misread as "love". Thus in the first edition of Ben Johnson's The Forest (1616), where the song first appeared in print, the line reads: "But might I of Iove's nectar sup". In Ben Jonson's time the initial J was just coming into use, and previously the standard would have been to use a capital I (as in classical Latin). The disappearance of Jove was probably not due to changing fashion, however, but to a popular misreading of the text of early editions. In particular, the line "But might I of Jove's nectar sup" is often rendered: "But might I of love's nectar sip". This literary background helps restore the original intention of the words from the blurring of certain lyrical variations which, while naïvely touching, do conceal the true meaning. 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." īesides Philostratus, a couple of other classical precedents have also been identified. Although only one conceit is not borrowed from Philostratus, the piece is a unified poem, and its glory is Jonson's.
This borrowing is discussed by George Burke Johnston in his Poems of Ben Jonson (1960), who points out that "the poem is not a translation, but a synthesis of scattered passages. Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,Īfter this song had been popular for almost two centuries, scholars began to discern that its imagery and rhetoric were largely lifted from classical sources - particularly one of the erotic Epistles of Philostratus the Athenian (c.
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