I have read Michael Drayton’s sonnets before, but somehow he had slipped from my consciousness; he was an Elizabethan poet who wanted to be a poet from a very early age. He was born in Warwickshire in 1563 and became a page to Sir Henry Goodere of Polesworth. Michael fell in love with Sir Henry’s daughter, Anne, and wrote many poems about and to her. Sadly she married another, but this didn’t stop Michael from loving and adoring her and writing about her. Sadly he may have never got over this young love and he never married. It seems that he suffered various misfortunes, although he worked hard and did have a number of influential patrons, as was the way for poets at this time. He had a long life, and died at the advanced age for those days of seventy-eight in London.
Here is one of his sonnets:
Who hath some long and dang’rous voyage been,
And called to tell of his discovery,
How far he sailed, what countries he had seen;
Proceeding from the port whence he put forth,
Shows by his compass how his course he steered,
When east, when west, when south, and when by north,
As how the pole to ev’ry place was reared,
What capes he doubled, of what continent,
The gulfs and straits that strangely he had passed,
Where most becalmed, where with foul weather spent,
And on what rocks in peril to be cast:
Thus in my love, time calls me to relate
My tedious travels and oft-varying fate.
Lois Elsden 