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- 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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# 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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SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
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