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# SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
The obsequious dependant and professional suitor declares himself to be a sleepless lover, sleepless because of the cruelty
**XLIV. I–2.** If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way.
**LXI. I–2.** Is it thy will thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Similarly Spenser wrote of Queen Elizabeth in 1591 in his *Colin Clouts come home againe* with a warmth that must mislead any reader who closes his ears and eyes to the current conventions of amorous expression. Here are some of his assurances of regard (li. 472–80):
To her my thoughts I daily dedicate,
To her my heart I nightly martyries:
To her my love I lowly do prostrate,
To her my life I wholly sacrifice:
My thought, my heart, my love, my life is she,
And I hers ever only, ever one:
One ever I all vowed hers to be,
One ever I and others never none.
As in Raleigh’s case, Spenser draws attention to his sufferings as his patron’s lover by night as well as by day. To take a third of a hundred instances that could be adduced of the impassioned vein of poetic addresses to Queen Elizabeth, Richard Barnfield wrote a volume of poems called (like Raleigh’s poem) *Cynthia*, in honour of his sovereign (published in 1595). In a prefatory address he calls the Queen ‘his mistress’. Much high-strung panegyric follows, and he reaches his climax of adoring affection in a brief ode attached to the main poem. There he describes how, after other adventures in the fields of love, ‘Eliza’ has finally written her name on his heart ‘in characters of crimson blood’. Her fair eyes have inflicted on him a fatal wound. The common note of familiarity in a poet’s addresses to patrons is well illustrated by the fluency of style in which Barnfield professes his affection for the Queen:
Her it is, for whom I mourne;
Her, for whom my life I scorne;
Her, for whom I weepe all day;
Her, for whom I sigh, and say,
Either She, or els no creature,
Shall enjoy my loue: whose feature
Though I neuer can obtaine,
Yet shall my true loue remaine:
Till (my body turned to clay)
My poore soule must passe away,
To the heauens; where (I hope)
Hit shall finde a resting scope:
Then since I loued thee (alone)
Remember me when I am gone.
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