ABSTRACT
Any anthology of Elizabethan or Jacobean lyrics will include poems taken from plays and masques. Rosader’s verses on his mistress’s excellence from Lodge’s romance, Rosalynde, might stand as the pattern of the Elizabethan love-catalogue, the stanza-by-stanza glorification of the beloved’s physical amibutes – eyes, cheeks, lips, neck and breasts. A more successful philosophical poem, though not strictly ‘Elizabethan’, is ‘Ode upon a Question moved Whether Love should continue for ever’ by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648). It anticipates the stanza of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Lord Herbert, the elder brother of George Herbert, was a man who distinguished himself in so many fields, as philosopher, diplomatist, soldier and autobiographer, that Jonson declared: If man get name for some one virtue, thenWhat man art thou, that art so many men.
