“Come again, sweet love doth now invite” is a song with music John Dowland, anonymous lyrics. This is not that song. That is a great song though–very over the top sad and also very cute and catchy! This is music I wrote for those same lyrics.
Come again!
Sweet love doth now invite
Thy graces that refrain
To do me due delight,
To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,
With thee again in sweetest sympathy.Come again!
That I may cease to mourn
Through thy unkind disdain;
For now left and forlorn
I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die
In deadly pain and endless misery.All the night
My sleeps are full of dreams,
My eyes are full of streams.
My heart takes no delight
Her smiles, my springs that makes my joys to grow,
Her frowns the Winters of my woe.Out alas,
My faith is ever true,
Yet will she never rue
Nor yield me any grace;
Her eyes of fire, her heart of flint is made,
Whom neither tears nor truth may once persuade.
The first of a bit of a project of setting old/Elizabethan era lyrics/poetry to music…
Dowland, and others of the era, but Dowland was RENOWNED for it, wrote such enjoyably, beautifully, over-the-top melancholy tragic songs. This was super trendy and they were really POPULAR.
So, if there’s a concept here, it’s that I’m setting the words with the same kind of melancholy and sincerity despite their excessiveness, but in a more modern folk-pop-idk idiom, a sort of parallel.