My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,
And though the sager sort our deeds reprove,
Let us not weigh them. Heaven’s great lamps do dive
Into their west, and straight again revive,
But soon as once set is our little light,
Then must we sleep one ever-during night.

These lines are Thomas Campion’s English adaptation of a famous Latin love lyric by Catullus (“Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,” poem 5). Campion (1567–1620)—poet, composer, and physician—often wrote songs and epigrams that reworked classical themes for an early modern English readership. The passage belongs to the Renaissance “carpe diem” tradition, urging lovers to seize pleasure in the face of time, social censure, and mortality. By invoking “Lesbia,” Catullus’s poetic name for his beloved, Campion signals the poem’s classical pedigree while recasting it in smooth, songlike couplets suited to the period’s lyric tastes.

The speaker urges an intense, present-focused love that refuses to be governed by moralistic observers (“the sager sort”). The central contrast is cosmic: the sun and stars (“Heaven’s great lamps”) set and rise again, but human life—“our little light”—once extinguished, does not return. The argument is both sensual and philosophical: because death brings an “ever-during night,” lovers should not squander their brief daylight worrying about reputation or judgment. Campion’s phrasing turns Catullus’s blunt urgency into a more polished meditation, but the meaning remains a classic carpe diem logic grounded in the finality of mortality.