"Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes" is a popular old song, the lyrics of which are the poem "To Celia" by the English playwright Ben Jonson, first published in 1616.
Lyrics
After this song had been popular for almost two centuries, scholars began to discern that its imagery and rhetoric were largely lifted from classical sources - particularly one of the erotic Epistles of Philostratus the Athenian (c. 170 – 250 AD). This borrowing is discussed by George Burke Johnston in his Poems of Ben Jonson (1960), who points out 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."<ref>George Burke Johnston, Poems of Ben Jonson (1960), "Introduction" p.xl. The author notes (p. 331) that while the authoritative proof of this borrowing was made by John Addington Symonds, in The Academy 16 (1884), a century earlier the dramatist Richard Cumberland had identified the link to "an obscure collection of love-letters" by Philostratus. (Richard Cumberland, The Observer: being a collection of moral, literary and familiar essays Volume 3 (Dublin: printed by Zachariah Jackson, for P. Byrne, R. Marchbank, J. Moore, and W. Jones, 1791), pp. 238-240.) The poet John F.M. Dovaston also discussed the borrowing in The Monthly Magazine of 1815, p. 123f.</ref>
Besides Philostratus, a couple of other classical precedents have also been identified.
This literary background helps restore the original intention of the words from the blurring of certain lyrical variations which, while naïvely touching, do conceal the true meaning. In particular, the line "But might I of Jove's nectar sup" is often rendered: "But might I of love's nectar sip". The disappearance of Jove was probably not due to changing fashion, however, but to a popular misreading of the text of early editions. In Ben Jonson's time the initial J was just coming into use, and previously the standard would have been to use a capital I (as in classical Latin). Thus in the first edition of Ben Johnson's The Forest (1616), where the song first appeared in print, the line reads: "But might I of Iove's nectar sup". "Iove" here indicates Jove, but this was misread as "love". The word "sup" has also often been changed to "sip"; but "sup" rhymes with "cup", and is clearly the reading in the first edition. The meaning of the line is that even if the poet could drink to his heart's content of the nectar of the king of the gods, he would prefer the nectar made by his earthly beloved.
Melody
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 Granville Bantock and Roger Quilter. Quilter's setting was included in the Arnold Book of Old Songs, published in 1950.