The Poems (1599 Edition)
| Number | Author | First line | Information |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | William Shakespeare | "When my love swears that she is made of truth" | First publication, later appears as Sonnet 138 in Shakespeare's sonnets.
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| 2 | William Shakespeare | "Two loves I have, of comfort and despair" | First publication, later appears as Sonnet 144 in Shakespeare's sonnets.
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| 3 | William Shakespeare | "Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye" | Spoken by Nathaniel in Act 4, Scene II of Love's Labour's Lost. The inclusion of this poem (and 5 and 16) says much about Jaggard's taste: in the play, they are intended to be examples of bad poetry. |
| 4 | William Shakespeare? | "Sweet Cytherea, sitting by a brook" | On the theme of Venus and Adonis, as is Shakespeare's narrative poem. |
| 5 | William Shakespeare | "If love make me forsworn, how shall I swear to love?" | Spoken by Nathaniel in Act 4, Scene II of Love's Labour's Lost.
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| 6 | William Shakespeare? | "Scarce had the sun dried up the dewy morn" | On the theme of Venus and Adonis, as is Shakespeare's narrative poem. |
| 7 | William Shakespeare? | "Fair is my love, but not so fair as fickle" | In the same six-line stanza format as Venus and Adonis. |
| 8 | Richard Barnfield | "If music and sweet poetry agree" | First published in Poems in Divers Humors (1598). |
| 9 | William Shakespeare? | "Fair was the morn when the fair queen of love" | On the theme of Venus and Adonis, as is Shakespeare's narrative poem. |
| 10 | William Shakespeare? | "Sweet rose, fair flower, untimely pluck'd, soon vaded" | In the same six-line stanza format as Venus and Adonis. |
| 11 | Bartholomew Griffin | "Venus, with young Adonis sitting by her" | Printed in Fidessa (1596). On the theme of Venus and Adonis, as is Shakespeare's narrative poem. |
| 12 | Thomas Deloney (?) | "Crabbed age and youth cannot live together" | Was reprinted with additional stanzas in 1631 in Thomas Deloney's Garden of Goodwill. Deloney died in 1600; he might be the author of 12, though collections of his verse issued after his death contain poems by other authors.
Critic Hallett Smith has identified poem 12 as the one most often favoured by readers as possibly Shakespearean – "but there is nothing to support the attribution." |
| 13 | William Shakespeare? | "Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good" | In the same six-line stanza format as Venus and Adonis. |
| 14 | William Shakespeare? | "Good night, good rest. Ah, neither be my share" | In the same six-line stanza format as Venus and Adonis. Originally published as two poems; some scholars, therefore, consider them as 14 and 15, adding 1 to all subsequent poem numbers. |
| 15 | William Shakespeare? | "Lord, how mine eyes throw gazes to the east!" | In the same six-line stanza format as Venus and Adonis. |
| 16 | William Shakespeare | "It was a lording's daughter, the fairest one of three" | Read by Dumain in Act 4, Scene III of Love's Labour's Lost
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| 17 | "Ignoto" (Richard Barnfield?) | "On a day, alack the day!" | Printed in an anthology titled England's Helicon in 1600; it is there assigned to "Ignoto" (Latin for "unknown"). The same collection gives Barnfield's number 20 to "Ignoto" as well, leading to the supposition that 17 might also be Barnfield's. Number 17 had been published previously, with a musical setting, in the Madrigals of Thomas Weelkes (1597). |
| 18 | "When as thine eye hath chose the dame" | F. E. Halliday an others have found a resemblance between number 18 and Canto 44 of Willobie His Avisa (1594) by Henry Willobie, a poem in which Willobie listens to advice from his friend "W.S.", often conjectured to be Shakespeare. The content of the advice and the stanza format are identical to Willobie's lines, supposed to be W.S.'s words. In addition, poem 18 is in the same six-line stanza format as Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. A variant text of the poem exists in a manuscript collection of verse made c.1595 for Anne Cornwallis, daughter of Sir William Cornwallis. Though most of the poems in the manuscript are attributed, this one is not. |
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| 19 | Christopher Marlowe & Sir Walter Raleigh | "Come live with me and be my love"; "If all the world and love were young" | An inferior text of Marlowe's poem The Passionate Shepherd to His Love followed by the first stanza of Sir Walter Raleigh's The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd |
| 20 | Richard Barnfield | "As it fell upon a day" | First published in Poems in Divers Humors (1598). |
Read more about this topic: The Passionate Pilgrim
Famous quotes containing the word poems:
“After all, poets shouldn’t be their own interpreters and shouldn’t carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)