The Ocean to Cynthia (pub. 1870) and ‘Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay’.
This claims that, thanks to The Faerie Queene (addressed to Ralegh), Elizabeth’s fame
eclipses that of Petrarch’s Laura.
The poems Ralegh printed advertise ambition foiled. A bold soldier and chief
colonist of Virginia, he became the Queen’s favourite and was knighted in 1584. But
in 1592 an affair with a maid of honour lost him favour. Briefly in the Tower, he
wrote ‘Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expired’, and his finest poem, ‘As you
came from the holy land’:As you came from the holy land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?
How shall I know your true love,
That have met many one
As I went to the holy land,
That have come, that have gone?
She is neither white nor brown,
But as the heavens fair,
There is none hath a form so divine
In the earth or the air.The pilgrim returning from Walsingham (a Norfolk shrine to the Virgin Mary),
recognizes this ‘she’: Elizabeth’s hair was red. Ralegh’s ballad (in anapaests) manages
to be energetic, dignified and plaintive. Decisive movement marks the reproaches of
‘The Lie’ (‘Go, soul, the body’s guest, / Upon a thankless errand’), containing the
memorable envoi:Sa y to the court it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Sa y to the church it shows
What’s good, and doth no good:
If church and court reply,
Then give them both the lie.Condemned to death for plotting against James’s accession, Ralegh was let out of
the Tower in 1616 to lead an expedition to the golden kingdom of El Dorado, which
he claimed to exist in Guiana. Not finding it, his men burnt a Spanish settlement; on
his ret urn in 1618 he was beheaded. Some poems from the Tower, like ‘Even such is
Time’, go beyond his disappointments to re-express the moral conviction of earlier
Tudor verse in the simpler forms in which he excelled. The similar moral verse of
‘T he Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, formerly Ralegh’s, has recently been reattributed
to an anonymous Catholic recusant.Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staffof faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,
And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.Ralegh’s sombre History of the World (1614) has a justly famed conclusion:102 3 · TUDOR LITERATURE: 1500–1603