SOURCE: “Companion Poems in the Ralegh Canon,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 13, No. 3, Autumn, 1983, pp. 260-73.

In the following essay, May discusses a few Elizabethan companion poems attributed to Raleigh, concluding these poems “form a coherent pattern which expands our understanding of the overall role of poetry in his life.”

A number of “companion poems” have survived from the Elizabethan Age in the form of verses which are linked not through general literary influence or similarity but through unmistakably direct relationships. One poem may answer another, usually in a contradictory fashion, or two or more poems may begin with similar themes and wording in what appear to be exercises in literary collaboration or competition. Examples of the first type are Sir Edward Dyer's verses beginning “The lowest trees have tops” and the Earl of Oxford's “Weare I a Kinge I coulde commande content,” both of which elicited a...