Now winter nights enlarge The number of their hours; And clouds their storms discharge Upon the airy towers...

These lines are from Thomas Campion’s lyric “Now winter nights enlarge,” a late-Elizabethan/Jacobean song-poem written for musical performance. Campion (1567–1620) was both poet and composer, and many of his lyrics were published with (or intended for) lute-song settings in his songbooks. The poem belongs to a common early modern seasonal mode: winter’s lengthened nights and violent weather are set against human warmth, festivity, and indoor sociability. In this milieu, “airy towers” evokes exposed, lofty structures battered by storms—an image that heightens the contrast between the harsh exterior world and the sheltered, convivial interior where song, love, and good cheer can persist despite the season.

The stanza opens by personifying winter as an agent that “enlarge[s]” the nights, stretching time itself into a darker, more oppressive duration. The following image—clouds discharging storms upon “airy towers”—adds a sense of height and vulnerability: what is elevated and outward-facing is most subject to winter’s assault. In Campion’s lyric logic, such bleak natural description typically functions as a foil for the human response: retreat into warmth, music, and companionship. The lines thus participate in a Renaissance carpe diem sensibility, not by denying winter’s severity, but by sharpening the value of pleasure and fellowship as deliberate acts of resistance against cold, darkness, and transience.