Michael Drayton isn’t perhaps as well-known as other Elizabethan and Jacobean poets today, but in his day he was an associate of some of the most famous and renowned writers, dramatists ans poets, and was considered an equal. It is thought that he was drinking with Shakespeare and Ben Johnson, having a ‘ merry meeting, and it seems, drank too hard,’ resulting in the untimely death of Shakespeare!
Drayton, like Shakespeare was born in Warwickshire, but his family came from the village of Hartshill, near Nuneaton. He was born in 1563, a year before Shakespeare; he may have studied at Oxford, and was at the court of Elizabeth I. He was very famous and respected in his life time, and wrote plays, was involved in the theatre, and produced other works as well as verse. he is credited for the first person to have written odes in English in the style of the Roman poet Horace.
He died in 1631, nearly four hundred years ago, but like other poets of his age, his work still speaks to us.
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,
Nay I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one lot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath,
When his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,
When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And innocence is closing up his eyes,
-Now if thou would’st, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might’st him yet recover!
http://theshakespeareblog.com/2013/12/michael-draytons-poly-olbion/
Lois Elsden 