SOURCE: "Inscribing Imperfection: Sir Walter Ralegh and the Elizabethan Court," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 233–53.

In the following essay, Campbell analyzes the structure and historical context of Raleigh's "The Ocean to Cynthia," arguing that the work is "a poem consumed with loss " for Raleigh's failure to remain in favor with Queen Elizabeth I.

The poem by Sir Walter Ralegh known as "The Ocean to Scinthia" has long provided a puzzle for critics, who acknowledge its emotional power and intellectual complexity, but feel uneasy about its clearly unfinished state. In twentieth-century criticism the poem has been largely ignored, or patronized, or else appropriated for an alien aesthetic; Donald Davice, for example, writing in 1960 [in Elizabethan Poetry], constructs it as a proto-modernist fragment, a daring prolepsis of the work of Eliot and Pound. In what follows I shall place "The Ocean to Scinthia" in a different critical...