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SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
to the greatest of all patrons of Elizabethan poetry—the Queen. The poets who sought her favour not merely commended the beauty of her mind and body with the semblance of amorous ecstasy; they carried their professions of ‘love’ to the extreme limits of realism. They seasoned their notes of adoration with reproaches of inconstancy and infidelity, which they couched in the peculiarly intimate vocabulary that is characteristic of genuinely thwarted passion.
Sir Walter Raleigh.
Sir Walter Raleigh offers especially vivid evidence of the assurance with which the poetic client offered his patron the homage of varied manifestations of amoristic sentiment. He celebrated his devotion to the Queen in a poem, called Cynthia, consisting of twenty-one books, of which only the last survives.¹ The tone of such portion as is extant is that of ecstatic love which is incapable of restraint. At one point the poet reflects
[How] that the eyes of my mind held her beams
In every part transferred by love’s swift thought;
Far off or near, in waking or in dreams
Imagination strong their lustre brought.
Such force her angelic appearance had
To master distance, time or cruelty.
Raleigh’s simulated passion rendered him
intentive, wakeful, and dismayed,
In fears, in dreams, in feverous jealousy.²
¹ The date of Raleigh’s composition is uncertain; most of the poem was probably composed about 1594. ‘Cynthia’ is the name commonly given the Queen by her poetic admirers. Spenser, Barnfield, and numerous other poets accepted the convention.
² With some of the italicized words, passages in Shakespeare’s sonnets may be compared, e.g.:
XXVII. 9–10. . . . my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view.
XLIII. 11–12. When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay.
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