woman with the needs of any woman, or man, for that
matter. Having made the offer, the nun then closes the
poem by referring back to the turning of the tides and
the passing of time. She does not expect to outlive the
next tide. This oft-anthologized Irish lament remains
popular to this day and easily rivals any other early
Irish or English poem of its kind.
See also EARLY IRISH VERSE.
FURTHER READING
Kato, Eileen. “A Comparative Look at ‘Ono no Komachi’
and ‘The Old Woman of Beare.’ ” Transactions of the Asiatic
Society of Japan 11 (1996): 135–149.
MacCana, Proinsias. “Mythology in Early Irish Literature.”
In Celtic Consciousness, edited by Robert O’Driscoll, 143–
- New York: George Braziller, 1982.
Mark DiCicco
“ON MONSIEUR’S DEPARTURE” ELIZA-
BETH I (ca. 1582) This poem was written about
1582 at the conclusion of the marriage negotiations
between England and France regarding the potential
marriage of Queen ELIZABETH I and Francis, duc
d’Alençon, whom she called “Monsieur.” Elizabeth, as
a single queen, was very circumspect on the issue of
marriage, as she realized that a consort would neces-
sarily weaken her own authority. Negotiations for the
marriage with the duc d’Alençon were the last engaged
in by the queen, as she was 49 by the time they con-
cluded and presumably past childbearing age. How-
ever, the language in the poem suggests that the queen
did have a certain amount of affection for the man who
was many years her junior.
The poem has three STANZAs, each with an ababcc
rhyme scheme. It is organized around a series of con-
tradictions between the queen’s private and public
bodies. Her private, inner, woman’s body feels sad at
the various implications surrounding the end of the
“betrothal,” while her public, queen’s body needs to
hide all her personal feelings and act for the good of
the country. In the fi rst stanza, the queen indicates that
inwardly she grieves, loves, wants to say what she
means, talks incessantly, and suffers the pains of LOVE-
SICKNESS: “I am, and not; I freeze and yet am burned, /
Since from myself another self I turned” (ll. 5–6). Out-
wardly, however, she “dare not” (l. 1) show how upset
she is or what she really feels about the situation. She is
“forced to seem to hate” (l. 2) the man who was part of
the marriage deal.
In the second stanza, Elizabeth talks about how her
“care” (l. 7), what or who she cares about, is “like my
shadow in the sun” (l. 7). Just as our shadows are part
of us—following us or going before us, depending on
the time of day—her “care” is always with her just as
her shadow is. He has, in a sense, become so much a
part of her that she fi nds “No means... to rid him
from my breast [or heart], / Till by the end of things it
be suppressed” (ll. 11–12). Again, like the person suf-
fering from lovesickness, only death will end the
queen’s pain.
The third stanza allows the queen’s private, wom-
anly body to be revealed. She wishes a “gentler passion
to slide into” (l. 13) her mind, perhaps one that does
not cause her to freeze and burn as this one does. She
wishes this because, as a woman, she sees herself as
“soft, and made of melting snow” (l. 14). Now she
switches to address Love itself, to ask it to be, para-
doxically, more cruel to be more kind. This is sort of a
wish to be put out of her misery, as the stanza moves
back to the kind of opposition displayed in stanza 1.
She asks to either “fl oat or sink” or “be high or low” (l.
16), a request either to swim or drown, to be happy or
sad. The poem’s fi nal COUPLET puts things in an even
starker form: “Or let me live with some more sweet
content, / Or die and so forget what love e’er meant”
(ll. 17–18). The queen asks Love to grant her either a
life that contains some sort of pleasant comfort, or let
her die so that she can forget what love meant. Inter-
estingly, the poem ends with the Latin phrase Eliza-
betha Regina, “Elizabeth the Queen,” making us wonder
whether the queen fi nally decides to do what her pub-
lic body needs to do, despite the pain in her private
body.
FURTHER READING
Hopkins, Lisa. Writing Renaissance Queens: Texts by and
about Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Newark: Uni-
versity of Delaware Press; London: Associated University
Presses, 2002.
Marcus, Leah S. “Queen Elizabeth I as Public and Private
Poet: Notes toward a New Edition.” In Reading Monarch’s“ON MONSIEUR’S DEPARTURE” 301