When I was fair and young, and favour graced me -- Queen Elizabeth I

Guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1514) When I was fair and young, and favour graced me When I was fair and young, and favour graced me, Of many I was sought their mistress for to be. But I did scorn them all, and answered them therefore, 'Go, go, seek some otherwhere Importune me no more.' How many weeping eyes I made to pine with woe; How many sighing hearts I have no skill to show. Yet I the prouder grew, and answered them therefore, 'Go, go, seek some otherwhere Importune me no more.' Then spake fair Venus' son, that proud victorious boy, And said, "Fine dame, since that you be so coy I will so pluck your plumes that you shall say no more 'Go, go, seek some otherwhere Importune me no more.'" When he had spake these words, such charge grew in my breast That neither night nor day since that, I could take any rest. Then lo, I did repent that I had said before, 'Go, go, seek some otherwhere Importune me no more.' -- Queen Elizabeth I

A poem to supply the lack of Qs among the poets in the archive.

Queen Elizabeth wrote this poem in the mid-1580s when she was in her 50s.
Her life-long love, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester remarried after 18
years' widowhood -- contrary to the 1998 Shekhar Kapur film "Elizabeth,"
Dudley was not banished in disgrace and well into middle age Elizabeth's
obvious, though certainly unconsummated, love for him continued to occasion
adverse comment in her own and foreign courts. This was a time when royal
marriages were dynastic and pragmatic; erotic love was not a proper basis
for them. And one final dalliance with the prospect of marriage, this time
with the much younger Duc d'Alençon, the brother of the king of France, had
come to naught. The poem can be interpreted as a commentary on the Queen's
sad realisation that opportunities for fulfilling her passionate nature in
marriage were now past. Or perhaps more generally the sadness and loss
involved in acquiring painful wisdom.

Mac Robb
Brisbane, Australia