A comment on yesterday's post asked me to explain glorious. First, my remark was hyperbole, though I don't apologize for it because that's what happens when a poem smacks me in the head: I immediately shift into a present-tense delirium, all my nerves and brainwaves exulting, "This is it! This is it!" Recollecting in tranquility, I'll attempt to explain why Elizabethan poetry so often has the ability to drive me temporarily mad with joy. I have never had any abiding interest in metaphysics or the armchair detection of secret identities. I don't care who Shakespeare's Dark Lady really was or which lovely Unas and Astraeas were invented to flatter an aging queen. What I love are the simple yet surprising, vigorous yet archaic, clever yet innocent manipulations of figurative language.

To whit: nearly every word of Raleigh's 30-line poem is devoted to comparing the idea of false love to something else. By the end of the third stanza, my mind is reeling, but is he done yet? Why, no--wait! There's more!

I think this is my favorite stanza. Whatever false love may be, if this is what it feels like, it's no wonder that it breaks our hearts.

A fortress foiled, which reason did defend,
A siren song, a fever of the mind,
A maze wherein affection finds no end,
A raging cloud that runs before the wind,
A substance like the shadow of the sun,
A goal of grief for which the wisest run.