Whether his modesty was false or true, the dolorous John Dowland deprecated himself a bit in the opening to his Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires. His "Epistle to the Reader" states that, "As in a hive of bees all labour alike to lay up honey … so in the house of learning and fame all good endeavourers should strive to add somewhat that is good." Presumably, he included his own efforts within the publication as "somewhat good." Of course, despite the manifold success of his first two books of lute-songs, the composer was still at the time living in exile from his London home and family, unable to obtain enough appropriate work in England. And the Third Booke does contain some seeming notes of both inspiration and mere industry. He includes a number of new instrumental combinations, as well as excellent lute-songs such as Flow not so fast, ye fountains. At the same time, the volume contains a piece which some commentators find not quite up to his usual standard, The Lowest Trees Have Tops.



Dowland's The Lowest Trees Have Tops sets a text, either by Francis Davison or Edward Dyer, which is rife with antitheses. English poets may have adopted a penchant for textual juxtaposiitons from Italian sources; the English madrigalists (and we can include Dowland as an honorary member that category) certainly learned from their Italian musical counterparts something of how to text-paint such opposites. Dowland may even go a bit over the top in his melodic reflections in The Lowest Trees. Right in the opening phrase, he evokes the low and high by an uncharacteristically angular melody, leaping both down, then up. He approaches a more traditional cadence for the spark's heat, and uses very small stepwise intervals to depict the tiny shadows made by a hair. The stinging bees incite a leaping melody again, and the sea strides purposefully down to its source. Dowland's final measure, in which he sets the punchline "and love is love in beggars and in kings," very suddenly takes on a more adroit and complex rhythmic character. Furthermore, Dowland certainly was aware how many of these same melodic gestures would also resonate with images in the second verse such as the deep fords and the few words spoken by "truest faith." While the musical effect of an entire verse may be uneven, so to the Tudor gentleman was the experience of love.



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