SOURCE: “’Knowinge shee cann renew’: Sir Walter Ralegh in Praise of the Virgin Queen,” in Criticism, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 497-515.

In the following essay, Beer analyzes the structure of The Ocean to Cynthia and challenges the assumption of the poem's incompleteness.

The critical history of Sir Walter Ralegh's poem, “the 11th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia,” has been dominated by attempts to explain the poem's “incompleteness,” and thus by attempts to describe exactly how and why the poem breaks down. In recent years, this debate has been continued in the language of new historicism and feminism. The poem offers fertile ground for such studies. Its status as an occasional poem, its position on the margins of the canon, its connection with Queen Elizabeth, its genesis in political and/or sexual crisis, have all served to attract critical attention, in a series of new...