SOURCE: “The Date of Raleigh's ‘21th: and Last Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’,” in The Review of English Studies, Vol. XXI, No. 82, May, 1970, pp. 143-58.

In the following essay, Duncan-Jones determines the time of composition for Raleigh's poem.

The longest surviving piece of poetry by Raleigh, the ‘21th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’, was first published, from the holograph at Hatfield, by Archdeacon [John] Hannah in his edition of The Courtly Poets in 1870.¹ Hannah believed from internal evidence that the poem was written during Raleigh's last imprisonment, under James I, between 1603 and 1612. [Edmund] Gosse, writing in 1886 about the poem as printed by Hannah, poured scorn on this theory, claiming that:

There is not a single phrase in the whole fragment that is not evidently addressed to a living, though perhaps hopelessly offended mistress.²

Although many of Gosse's statements are patently absurd—for instance, he...