Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes

"Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" is a popular old song, the lyrics of which are English playwright Ben Jonson's 1616 poem "."

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
     And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss within 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 nectar sip,
     I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
     Not so much honoring 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. Richard Cumberland had, however, identified the link to "an obscure collection of love-letters" by Philostratus as early as 1791. 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." Another classical strain in the poem derives from Catullus. 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 and other classical parallels could be attested, natural enough in a writer of as wide reading as Jonson.

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. This seems unlikely since Jonson's poem was set to an entirely different melody in 1756 by Elizabeth Turner. Another conception is that the original composition of the tune was by John Wall Callcott in about 1790 as a glee for two trebles and a bass. It was arranged as a song in the 19th century, apparently by Colonel Mellish (1777-1817). Later arrangements include those by and Roger Quilter. Quilter's setting was included in the Arnold Book of Old Songs, published in 1950.

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